(#5412) Endure even when enduring seems impossible

      In my experience the worst part of having to endure is the physical diminishment that comes with aging. I know that my life force is not as stout as it was when I was younger. It is almost a grind each day even when grinding is not required. Getting old sucks in other words. But, the opportunity to get old beats the alternative. Yet that doesn't negate the difficulty getting old presents when having to endure whatever trial or tribulation before us. There is no other choice in my book because life is preferable to not being alive. Of course there are times when the sacrifice of the one is for the greater of the few or the many but those are rare circumstances indeed.
     So putting one foot in front of the other is how I endure. One moment after another is my formula for getting upward toward a new or different plateau if you will excuse the heightened metaphor. I used to be able to tell myself just how exciting things would be to move past a difficult time in my life. That old ploy doesn't work as well now because the energy I had for the unknowable future is tempered with the knowledge that there really is not a lot of anything new under the Sun. Before when I was being tested for whatever reason I had an unblinded hope that my life was building toward something special. Now it is just maintaining and existing with less future available for some magnificent happening to occur.
     My endurance is still there for me to utilize but the activation of it is harder to start. I am much like an older battery that is sometimes barely able to start the motor. I do get the motor started but only after a few tries. Do I give up? No. But I admit that life has taken a measure of me from my beginning and lessened it to a point where the struggle to do what was never a problem before is only getting more difficult. So endure I will to push beyond my aging physical and mental limitations toward hope and it's possibilities. That is how I endure, through hope even when it is mostly hopeless. Yet even now I see that the last one little bit of hope is still greater than not trying to endure at all.