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    Perseverance
    Perseverance
    Perseverance
    Ebook153 pages1 hour

    Perseverance

    By Margaret J. Wheatley

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    By the bestselling author of Leadership and the New Science and Turning to One Another
    Thoughtful, compassionate reflections on how we can carry on with joy despite difficulties, challenges, and disappointments
    Illuminated by both beautiful original paintings and by poems and quotations from a variety of traditions and cultures

    In this inspiring and beautifully illustrated book, bestselling author Margaret Wheatley offers guidance to people everywhere for how to persevere through challenges in their personal lives, with their families, at their workplaces, in their communities, and in their struggles to make a better world. She provides hope, wisdom, and perspective for learning the discipline of perseverance.
    Wheatley does not offer the usual feel-good, rah-rah messages. Instead, she focuses on the situations, feelings, and challenges that can, over time, cause us to lose heart or lose our way. Perseverance is a day-by-day decision not to give up. We have to notice the moments when we feel lost or overwhelmed or betrayed or exhausted and note how we respond to them. And we have to notice the rewarding times, when we experience the joy of working together on something hard but worthwhile, when we realize we’ve made a small difference.
    In a series of concise and compassionate essays Wheately names a behavior or dynamic—such as fearlessness, guilt, joy, jealousy—that supports or impedes our efforts to persevere. She puts each in a broader human or timeless perspective, offering ways to either live by or transcend each one. These essays are self-contained—you can thumb through the book and find what attracts you in the moment. Perseverance helps you to see yourself and your situation clearly and assume responsibility for changing a situation or our reaction to it if it’s one that troubles us. There deliberately are no examples of other people or their experiences. You are the example—your personal experiences are the basis for change.
    In addition to Wheatley’s graceful essays there are poems and quotations drawn from traditions and cultures around the world and throughout history. The book is deeply grounded spiritually, accessing human experience and wisdom from many sources. This grounding and inclusiveness support the essential message—human being throughout time have persevered. We’re just the most recent ones to face these challenges, and we can meet them as those who came before us did. As Wheatley quotes the elders of the Hopi Nation: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
    Release dateSep 27, 2010
    ISBN9781605098555
    Perseverance
    Author

    Margaret J. Wheatley

    Margaret Wheatley is president emerita of the Berkana Institute. She has been a consultant since 1973, working in virtually every type of organization on all continents. She is coauthor of A Simpler Way and author of Turning to One Another and Finding Our Way as well as many articles, videos, and DVDs. She has also worked as a public school teacher, a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea, and as an associate professor of management at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University and Cambridge College, Massachusetts.

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    • 5/5
      i honestly think everyone should have a copy of this profound little book. enjoyed every minute of it.

    Book preview

    Perseverance - Margaret J. Wheatley

    style"

    PART ONE

    Here is a River

    TO MY FELLOW SWIMMERS:

    Here is a river flowing now very fast.

    It is so great and swift that there are those

    who will be afraid, who will try

    to hold on to the shore.

    They are being torn apart and

    will suffer greatly.

    I’m making my shoulders strong

    for the young to stand upon,

    stepping lightly on the backs of those

    who hold me up.

    It’s a chain of life unending,

    ever new and ever bending,

    grateful is the heart for the chance to be alive.

    Susan Osborn

    Singer/songwriter

    We’ve Been Here Before

    We have never been here before in terms of the global nature of our predicament. For the first time in human history (at least that we know of), we have endangered our home planet. And for the first time, we know what’s happening to just about all 7 billion of us humans, the challenges and terrors we endure and the occasional, reaffirming triumphs. Never before have humans been so aware of one another’s struggles, pain and perseverance. Never before have we known so many of the consequences of what we do—our thoughtless, violent, heroic and loving actions.

    Yet we have been here before. In our long, mysterious history, humans have had to struggle with enormous upheavals, dislocations, famines and fears. We’ve had to counteract aggression, protect our loved ones and face the end of life as we’ve known it. Over and over again.

    The scale is different now, but the human experience is the same. And so are our human spirits, capable of generosity or abuse, creativity or destruction, survival or extinction. As we face the challenges and struggles of this time, it might help to recall the centuries of solid shoulders we stand on.

    And if you reflect on your own life experience, what else have you endured? You’re still here—how did you stay here?

    How have you come through rough times before?

    What from your own personal history gives you now the capacity to get through this time?

    What Time Is It?

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

    it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,

    it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

    it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,

    it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,

    we had everything before us,

    we had nothing before us,

    we were all going direct to Heaven,

    we were all going direct the other way.

    In short, the period was so far like the present period,

    that some of its noisiest authorities insisted

    on its being received, for good or for evil,

    in the superlative degree of comparison only.

    Charles Dickens

    A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

    Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world

    all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part

    of the world that is within our reach. Any small,

    calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul,

    to assist some portion of this poor suffering world,

    will help immensely.

    Clarissa Pinkola Estes

    Writer

    It’s Our Turn

    Throughout human existence, there have always been people willing to step forward to struggle valiantly in the hope that they might reverse the downward course of events. Some succeeded, some did not. As we face our own time, it’s good to remember that we’re only the most recent humans who have struggled to change things.

    Getting engaged in changing things is quite straightforward. If we have an idea, or want to resolve an injustice, or stop a tragedy, we step forward to serve. Instead of being overwhelmed and withdrawing, we act.

    No grand actions are required; we just need to begin speaking up about what we care about. We don’t need to spend a lot of time planning or getting senior leaders involved; we don’t have to wait for official support. We just need to get started—for whatever issue or person we care about.

    When we fail, which of course we often will, we don’t have to feel discouraged. Instead, we can look into our mistakes and failures for the valuable learnings they contain. And we can be open to opportunities and help that present themselves, even when they’re different from what we thought we needed. We can follow the energy of Yes! rather than accepting defeat or getting stuck in a plan.

    This is how the world always changes. Everyday people not waiting for someone else to fix things or come to their rescue, but simply stepping forward, working together, figuring out how to make things better.

    Now it’s our turn.

    The future is no more uncertain than the present.

    Walt Whitman

    Poet

    Dwelling in Uncertainty

    Some people despair about the darkening direction of the world today. Others are excited by the possibilities for creativity and new ways of living they see emerging out of the darkness.

    Rather than thinking one perspective is preferable to the other, let’s notice that both are somewhat dangerous. Either position, optimism or pessimism, keeps us from fully engaging with the complexity of this time. If we see only troubles, or only opportunities, in both cases we are blinded by our need for certainty, our need to know what’s going on, to figure things out so we can be useful.

    Certainty is a very effective way of defending ourselves from the irresolvable nature of life. If we’re certain, we don’t have to immerse ourselves in the strange puzzling paradoxes that always characterize a time of

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