Perseverance. You've probably heard the word all your life, maybe you have even goaded yourself with it, or whipped yourself. Persevere! Don't give up, you fool! The lifeboat is coming!
Persistence. Continuing, in spite of failures, difficulty, obstacles, even discouragement.
Sure, that all sounds nice in a dictionary.
But persisting in real life can be tough. Even in a state of Grace, can you hang on, without turning aside? Can you hang on, without falling down?
Perseverance can be positive or negative, just like imagination, or beliefs, or action itself. You can persist when you shouldn't. Sometimes, as in addictions, we NEED to stop, and it is a bad thing to persistently continue doing something that will harm us.
You've heard the definition of insanity, that you keep doing the same thing and you keep expecting a different result? Isn't that insane? But think about it, what if you are doing the right thing, time and again, with perseverance, and you should be getting different results, and yet you keep getting the same negative ones.
“To say of what is, that it is not, or of what is not, that it is, is false;
while to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not, is true.”
- Aristotle
