Endurance

Endurance is different from grit or perseverance.  Endurance is the ability to keep pushing in the face of discomfort, but also in the face of an unreasonable future.  Endurance is the ability to put up with pain and discomfort, but also irresolution with no real offer of succor or success.

To endure is to keep on keeping on.  To trudge onward.  For no reason other than you believe in the ethos of endurance.

Endurance .

The endurance is the purpose.  The end result, the resolution, is merely an outcome. The goal achievement is merely a symptom of the endurance.

To endure is to set aside reason

Endurance is irrational.

Why keep doing something that has no predictable outcome?  Why drop your shoulder into the push of a lost cause?  Because there is purity in the lost cause.  It is not a lost cause, it is a cause and the end result, whether that be win or lose does not diminish the worthiness.

There is honesty in endurance.  The act of doing when the rest of the world tells you there is no hope.   Because there is always hope.  Hope is in the dropped shoulder to the wheel. Hope is in the single foot step.

There is a story of the Athenian general who beat the Spartans.  He asked of his men only one thing.  That one thing was, when he asked for it they would give him one step forward.  Nothing else.

And in the peak of the battle when the shields were locked, when the result hung in the balance, he had the horns blown and asked his men for one step forward.  At the crucial moment this broke the Spartan line.  In a moment, the battle was won.  With just one more step.

You might say that endurance is a fool’s game.  Because the longer you endure the weaker you get.  Why not turn away from the endurance?  Why waste your strength?

But, those of us who live the endurance ethos know that the opposite is true.  The longer you endure the more strength comes to you.  Spiritual strength. The strength of the ethos of endurance.

The strength of endurance is multiplied in groups.  If you endure as a group the entire group, the bonds of the group, the ethos of the group becomes stronger. Shared endurance builds bonds that are deeper.

Endurance is empowering.  For both the individual and the group.

Another story.  Ulysses Grant after bloody years of defeat was able to defeat Lee’s Army of Virginia.  What was different about Ulysses Grant?  He knew he had the numbers and the supplies. He just kept bashing against Lee’s lines.  Not in a suicidal way but in an endurance way.  And as his army endured it strengthened. The very thing that should have weakened the army made it stronger.

The veterans walking into the entrenched enemy over, and over again with no end in sight.  But, with each assault they became stronger.  They drew strength from the adversity. They drew strength from the endurance.

Endurance is irrational.

Endurance is the wellspring of its own strength.

Working in a startup breeds endurance.  The highs are high.  The lows are low. The emotion swing between the highest high and the lowest low.  It’s irrational.

The winners are able to draw strength from the challenge. To not see the lows and the highs but to endure to the process.  To wake up each day and do the things that need to be done today.

The ethos of endurance.  Because if not endurance than what?

Resignation.  Ease.  A small death.

And then there are endurance athletes.

Look at a training schedule.  How do you qualify for Boston?  How do you run 100 Miles?  How do you do anything?  You wake up each day and do those things that will bear fruit in 2 months, or 3 months or 3 years.  But you don’t think of those things you only think of today.

You endure.

You take one step.  You get knocked down.  You get up and take another.

There is no guaranteed future there is only today.  And the work.

Endurance is irrational.

The Irish Catholics from which I am bred are great believers in suffering and the value of endurance.  But suffering in itself for no purpose is not worthy.  Purposeless suffering is self-indulgent.

But, the interesting thing is that as you lean into Endurance it breeds its own purpose.

Endurance becomes purpose.  Endurance becomes noble because of that purpose.

Endurance is more than suffering.  It is active suffering.  And in its activeness, it is noble.

Endurance moves you all the way to your edge.  It moves you to that place where you have nothing.  Where you are nothing.

It can be seen almost as being on the edge of death. Then pulling back to find yourself.  Changed. Against all odds.

The naysayers will tell you; “you’ve suffered enough”.  Then you rise up and prove them wrong.  You suffer forward in your endurance.

Suffer forward.  Irrationally. Building strength.  Building purpose.  Enduring into the core nobility of the endurance ethos.

To see that distant light. To crawl and pull towards it. To scrabble from the depths of the cave of inhumanity with daemons clutching at you from all sides.  The loose stone and the mud.  The grasping for purpose.  To burst forth into the daylight with the stink of endurance.

To go to that point. Where it is just one more step.  One more battle.  One more breath.  The horizon of life muted to the very instance of action.

One more step.  One more call.  One more run into this day, this hour, this minute.

Endurance.