Persistence over consistency

The waves are always creating sand, but they’re also removing it. (Image by Melk Hagelslag)

What do you do when it’s too hard to keep going?

Maybe something has come up that requires your focus. Maybe you want to change direction. Maybe you just plain need a break.

So much is made of “staying consistent.” The implication is that if you are visibly inconsistent in your activities, then you are not fully committed.

However, when your commitment is to yourself, it can be renegotiated at regular intervals. And if you’ve built up layers and layers of commitments to yourself and others without decluttering any of them, things may be getting unwieldy.

There are some strands we can to stay committed to, and some that we can let go of.

But how do you decide which commitments to keep and which to drop? And how do you ensure that you’re not just tempted to quit something just because it’s uncomfortably hard?

I faced this issue last fall when I went through an especially busy and difficult time.

I kept up this blog, but I stopped making videos during that time. TikTok fell by the wayside.

I did feel the weight of this loss, because I missed making videos. I missed connecting with my TikTok friends. But I let my hiatus be a choice instead of a failure. There was no shame attached to the decision to let it go. There was regret. There was sadness. There was disappointment — but there was no shame.

This approach made it so that, when the time was right, I could return with enthusiasm. If I had beat myself up for quitting, I might not have been able to overcome the sense that I was unable to meet my own expectations. Instead, I adjusted my expectations to accommodate my capacity.

Sure, I could have cut something other than making videos. I could have dropped the blog instead. I could have made some alternative choices in my personal life. I could have taken on fewer clients. So what? None of it has to be a test of our perseverance and fortitude.

If I had dealt with a serious setback, I might have had to strip away some more layers, even giving up on activities that I find energizing and stabilizing. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Did I keep breathing? Great. That’s enough. (And if I were not able to keep breathing, that would have had to be enough as well.)

I have found that when I have less resistance to letting things go, it’s easier to pick them back up again. There’s no heaviness. There’s no drama. There’s no judgment. There’s just another simple choice.

Ironically, that same energy pervades my ongoing commitments. Whenever possible, I carry them with a lightness that reminds me that I am making the choice, every day, to continue to engage. While that makes it dangerously easy to quit, it also makes it easy to double down and keep going even when the going gets rough.

That’s how, even in hard times, we can find the strength to persist. Persistence does not require consistency — persistence allows us to show up again and again despite a lack of consistency.

We can’t persist with everything, all the time. But we can do it when we want to. Why should we bother? Because we decided to. Because even though we know we could quit, we’ve chosen not to. Because we’ve decided that it matters to us. That’s a beautiful thing.