Sometimes, the juice is worth the squeeze.

The honey badger, hunting a king cobra, is bitten in the melee. He kills the snake and begins to feast on its head, when suddenly, the poison begins to take effect. He passes out for a number of minutes, knocked out from the deadly toxin, laying just a few steps away from the partially eaten corpse. After a few minutes, the honey badger awakens, disoriented. Rather than being dissuaded or discouraged by the power of the snake’s poison, he slowly walks over to the king cobra’s half eaten body and finishes his meal.

Such is the nature of perseverance. Perseverance has no ego and no memory. It has no memory of past setbacks or perceived failures, or successes for that matter. Perseverance lives each day as if the achievements of the past have been washed away, striving anew each day to create new successes and opportunities for growth.  Its lack of attachment to the past, coupled with its ever present drive to move forward into the unknown is what gives perseverance its transformative power and ability to sublimate all struggle and hardship into something pure and liberating.

Perseverance is the energetic footprint that the unknown leaves from the future for us to discover in the present, and is what makes the unknown known. It is both the opportunity and precondition for self-discovery and mastery. Perseverance is the soul’s purest impulse to realize its highest vibration, courage in the face of the unknown and faith in its outcome. Or grace. Grace is the victory that perseverance promises when fully embraced. And victory is the euphoria of life’s most precious successes, those that inspire the act and expression of love.