The Virtues: Perseverance
Perseverance is the NASA rover that has been exploring Mars since February 18, 2021.The rover’s main goals are to search for signs of ancient life and collect rock samples to return to Earth by a future space-mission.
I developed perseverance in learning to tie my shoes, or should I say, in not learning to tie my shoes. As with my siblings, in an era before velcro, children were expected to know how to tie their own shoes before attending first grade. I couldn’t. I still couldn’t in second grade although both of my parents and my two older sisters and my younger brother each tried to teach me. I also could not button my shirt, use scissors, or zip up anything. It wasn’t that my fingers didn’t work. My brain just couldn’t make sense of what my eyes saw and interpret it in a way that my hands could replicate it. To add to all this, I was also failing in penmanship.
You may have guessed by now…I was a left-handed kid in a right-handed world.
I didn’t know the reason, but during this frustrating time, my mother took me to spend a week at my aunt and uncle’s home. My Aunt Rose was an artist and was very good with her hand/eye coordination. Shortly after my mom left, my aunt sat me down and asked if I wanted to learn how to tie my shoes. I reluctantly replied yes, yet again, since I still had not been able to master that skill.
“Carefully watch the way I do it,” she said. She showed me the exact same knot others had shown me, but she tied it “backwards.” I got it on my first try! Why? Because she, too, was lefthanded! By the end of the week, I could button my shirt, zip my pants, and draw inside the lines of a coloring book.
Perseverance is a virtue that is very important to learn as a young child. Teaching perseverance takes perseverance; learning perseverance takes perseverance; and exercising perseverance takes perseverance.
Grandparents can help their grandchildren learn this significant virtue. Think of an area that one of your grandchildren is struggling to persevere in and share your own story about learning how to “stick with it’ and “see it through.” Often just knowing that someone as old as you had to learn perseverance as a child can be a great encouragement. Mom and dad are teaching them perseverance because “kids have to learn it.” You are sharing with them from your own experience that you also had to work hard to learn it. Grandparents are in a unique position to say, “You can do this!”…in a way no one else can.
I believe I ultimately learned how to persevere far better than most kids my age and…I blame it on my shoes.
Oh, and those Martian rocks collected by the Perseverance rover? According to NASA, they will have to persevere another ten years before visiting earth. But hey, they’re rocks.
Mike Shaughnessy, the founder of Grandly, was never called “Lefty.”