Encouragement in Our Difficulties

Two weekends ago I hosted some folks at my annual spring garden clinic. Even if you’re not into gardening spring reminds us all that when dark days come, the glory of new life is always just around the corner.

My friend Leigh-Kathryn visited and spoke about the wonderful industrious nature of bees. So many of us love their honey, but we can also learn so much about efficiency and hard work from bees. I wrote about bees last year, here. I’ve also written about gardening, here.

Gardening and beekeeping teach me so much in my professional and personal life. This time of year, as so many of us are planting and readying for the coming harvest, I’m reminded of the value of work as it relates to difficulties.

A friend of mine recently shared this quote with me by the French mathematician Jean Le Rond D’Alembert:

“The difficulties you meet will resolve themselves as you advance.”

Right now, many of us are locked into the demands of our leadership roles. We’re planning, prioritizing, and doing our best to execute on time and with excellence. But invariably we’ll face difficulties. What will be our response?

In gardening and beekeeping one must work through obstacles. It’s easy to look at these two vocations through rose-colored lenses (forgive the pun!), but in reality both require patient work and the ability to persevere.

There’s something to showing up and doing the work right in front of us that propels us through the difficulties we face.

In her book Grit, Angela Duckworth points out that “consistency over the long run is everything.” It’s the effort not to just begin a task, but to keep doing it day in and day out. Getting back on the treadmill of life, to use one of Angela’s metaphors, is an act that separates those who persevere and those who don’t finish the task at hand.

The gardener and bee keeper face many challenges throughout the year: draught, pests, disease, lack of food. But the task of caring and cultivating must continue in order to reap the harvest. It is this day in and day out rigor that gets to us, but it’s also the very movement that directs us through the hard times and into harvest times.

Sometimes, the best way to find encouragement in our difficulties, is to just keep working hard. It is the resolute ones who find obstacles resolved.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash