FINDING YOUR MANTRA
When the chips are down it’s important to have words of encouragement to get you through.
You can’t always get them from other people so you’re going to need to have some of your own.
Words you’ll repeat when everything inside you wants to quit.
Words you can tell yourself at night when everyone else is asleep.
Words you will say over & over again until the light comes back in your eyes.
Your fight song, if you will. Mine is “Not Giving Up”.
It’s something I’ve said to myself millions of times over the past thirty six years.
Since elementary school, I’ve been proudly scrawling those words on notebooks. After every major setback in my life, I’ve journaled about how I believe that the only difference between winners and losers is that winners never give up. When my worst case scenario happened, it felt as if all of the air was knocked out of me. I found my will to live nearly extinguished. For the first time in my life, I felt like giving up.
By divine intervention, a friend of mine had just released a song called “Pound The Rock” about not giving up. It became as crucial as oxygen to my heart.
At precisely the moment I lost all my faith in humanity, Johnny showed up with his unassuming proclamation that all I really had to do was not give up. Somehow he knew the song in my heart and repeated in back to me when I’d forgotten all the words.
I could not commit to showering, doing most daily activities or believing that things would get better during the darkest times. I could however commit to not giving up as long as it was all that I had to do.
I must have listened to that song a million times the year after my husband died. It got me out of bed in the morning, carried me through every work day and wrapped me up at night when I felt the most alone.
Like an incubator, those words protected me until I could breathe again on my own. They kept my blood pumping when my heart had all but given out. They brought me back to life.
It turns out not giving up really is all that we have to do.
What’s your mantra?