Daily Gratitude: This is an interesting definition of courage. I think it helps more than some of the others for me at least. Essentially, if you’re afraid of something, you need to find something that is related to that fear but to you that thing is much more important than the fear. I look back on my life and I see how that has been true. I rarely have gotten rid of the fear but have often been able to act past it when something was really important to me. I have always had a tremendous fear of dentists. But in late 2018 I forced myself to have extensive dental surgery. Why? Because i wanted to do my attempt to cross the USA on foot and needed to have it done to hopefully prevent being sidelined because of anything dental related. That took great courage- which i was able to muster only because I had wanted to do this crossing for 30 years. I didn’t want anything to interfere. I was also extremely afraid of airplanes when I was young. I was in Vermont when my grandfather died in Florida. It was very important for me to go to the funeral for my grandmother so i had to push past the fear to get on two airplanes. Had my grandmother been the one who passed away i would have never gone because my grandfather was not very cognitively aware and he wouldn’t have known. Think back over your life and see if you can find any times that you overcame your fear!

Daily Gratitude: More on persistence. I learned this (again) during Vol State this year. There wasn’t any time that the race was easy this year. Sometimes they were a bit easier than others but never easy. This was my own doing since I made myself really push on day 1 and because of that i sacrificed a lot and was paying for it through the rest of the race. If you were following, you’ll remember my “gut incident” on the side of the road in the middle of the night just outside of Shelbyville. For about the next 24 hours I stopped any intake (food and liquids) so the incident didn’t repeat. That, of course, led to other problems. Fortunately by this point in the race I had refocused myself enough to simply think about getting some rest and then gradually starting my intake again. I knew I had to keep going. And since I was focused on the present moment, I was able to handle that without worrying about what was going to happen in another day or three. That’s how I handled each difficulty as it arose. I did my best to keep from getting bogged down.

Daily Gratitude: When this happens and you have to fight a battle again and again, take a few minutes to look and see if there’s a message there. Is there something you keep doing that gets you into this same situation repeatedly? What are you missing? Often the lesson keeps showing up because you haven’t learned what you’re supposed to learn. This may be hard to take but I think if you look at your past experiences, you’ll see how this has happened before. The sooner you accept this, the quicker you can change your life.