Be the Stream

Occasionally you find a rare gem on facebook... do you like the two time words I used there?  Occasionally and rare?  Sure, they go together.  Anyway - today I found one of those on a friend's status update.  It read:

In the battle between the stream and the stone, the stream wins, not by strength but by unrelenting perseverance. 

 I won't lie, I've had a major problem with perseverance in my life.  From the time I was young I was kind of a wanderer.  I've come to accept that this is much how I am by nature.  God has made me this way, but it sure makes life hard sometimes.  Here are some examples:

• I did well at school because everything went from test to test to test to test.  Finals were hard for me in high school, and I always aced them, but it was because, even though there was a great deal of information to retain, there was an end in sight.  
• I started and quit more hobbies in my life than most kids.  Dance. Check.  Tumbling.  Check.  Softball.  Check.  I wanted to be a 'natural' at something, and if I didn't perfect it from square one, count me out. 
• I was a poet long before I was any other kind of writer.  Poetry was easy.  I could sit down in one attempt and finish a poem and find it perfect (enough for me anyway) when it was over.  Instant gratification, I guess you could say.  But really, I just didn't have to trust myself to come back to it.  
• I start going to the gym. 
• I start new routines with the kids. 
• I start writing a new book. 
• Yada yada yada yada. 

 If I were a {real} runner, I'd be a sprinter, not a marathon {or half marathon} runner.  I don't know perseverance.  Not in a way that's seemed real to me.  

I think the undercurrent is, if I have to vest a lot into something, only to not succeed, I've only wasted a whole lot of time.  And that all comes down to self esteem.  The stream knows, somehow, that it will win in the end... and somehow I've got to be the stream.  

Unrelenting perseverance... I need to go run. 

-A