11th Day of Yule – Remembering the Noble Virtue of Perseverance
December 30th
"If you give up, you die. It really is simple, isn’t it? No matter what you are doing, see it to its conclusion. Even if you try and fail, realize that the only real failure is not trying. Failure is evidence that someone has tried. Success is failure defeated."
'The Tortoise and the Hare' is a fable attributed to Aesop. The story goes that a hare, who thinks rather highly of himself and who ridicules a slow-moving tortoise, challenges the tortoise to a race. The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind, and confident of winning, decides to take a nap midway through the course. When he awakes, however, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has arrived before him.
There are many interpretation's to 'The Tortoise and the Hare' fable. Some view the fable as morally ambiguous, while later interpreters have asserted that it is the proverbial 'the more haste, the worse speed', or have applied it to the Biblical observation that 'the race is not to the swift'. In Classical times it was not the tortoise’s plucky conduct in taking on a bully that was emphasized, but the Hare’s foolish over-confidence.
I view it another way. The tortoise, knowing full well that he couldn't beat the hare, decided to take on the challenge anyway. He started, continued and finished the race. He didn't tell himself that he couldn't do it. He didn't give up halfway through the race, he finished it. It was through his perseverance that he showed us that we too, even though we be tortoise's, can start and finish the race - any race.
We don't have to have boat loads of confidence to win at the situations in our lives. We just have to show up, put in our best effort and persevere.
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