Photo: Nationalgeographic.com
Perseverance Pays Off
If you read my post on Watchwords the other day, you’ll recognize one of them in the title above. I’ve noticed the word in recent articles or popping up in conversations over the past few days, but this evening I actually experienced first hand the wisdom in trusting that perseverance pays off.
And no, it’s not what you think. My epiphany has nothing to do with internal fortitude or relentlessly putting my shoulder to the wheel, pushing forward in the face of dire circumstances or daunting poll numbers. My appreciation for the benefits that perseverance can bring to our lives is much simpler and mundane.
Yet it made our evening.
In the midst of all the anxiety and insanity surrounding the election and – perhaps even worse, the worry over how things will unfold post-election – Karl and I persevered. And it paid off.
Embracing Distraction
The weather where I live shifted dramatically late this afternoon. It felt like the temperature dropped about 20 degrees within the span of half an hour. I’d been working at my usual perch on our porch, engaging in a long distance reading for a client and friend, when all of a sudden I realized that the wind had shifted and I was cold. Shifting my workspace inside, I completed the session, but I was chilled to the bone.
I flirted with the idea of taking a long, hot bath and just settling in to crack open a book I picked up at the library just yesterday. But Karl was the pushy one tonight, prodding me to take a walk, even if it was just our shorter two mile jaunt.
Upon our return, we agreed that we just wanted to hunker down, get warm, pig out (no, I’m not going there), and lose ourselves in a distracting movie – ideally a feel-good one.
Karl suggested a movie that looked light and might have potential. I think it was called The Prince & Me, and it was airing on Netflix. Good grief; it was awful. The dialogue was stilted, the premise formulaic. And while I don’t claim to be a film connoisseur, even I have my limit. We gave it a total of about 20 minutes and had to just let it die on the vine.
We surfed the movie lineups on a couple of channels. (It should be noted here that Karl was hell-bent on watching a movie. We’re actually in the middle of a couple of really great series, but he wanted a movie.) We saw one that had Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in it: Downhill, and gave it a try. Oh my. It was a downer. We like both actors and wanted to like the movie, but no. No. We wanted to laugh. Or at least not feel like we were being forced to watch a marriage plunge off the side of a mountain in slow motion.
Out of Character
Once again, we gave the movie a good 35-40 minutes or so to redeem itself and give us a reason to stick with it. (Yes, we gave it a slightly longer opportunity than we gave the other. The writing – and acting – were both significantly better than the first debacle.) But alas, as out of character as it was for us not to just ‘stick with it’ (and suffer), we persevered in our quest to find a movie that would lift us out of our routine thoughts and existential concerns. We turned off Downhill and resumed our search for a movie that would fit the bill.
And we prevailed.
Karl had another suggestion. One we had to dig for because he misremembered the title and our search kept coming up empty. But then he remembered enough of the title for us to ultimately zero in on it: Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Watch the trailer.
Quirky for sure, but most definitely a worthy distraction. I recommend it for many reasons: amazing scenery (you can’t beat New Zealand for stunning scenery), the accents, a plot line that held a number of surprises, and heart. The movie definitely has heart.
So while our perseverance tonight may not have yielded transformation, it did put smiles on both of our faces. Our moods most definitely shifted as a result of our relentless pursuit of a movie to take our minds off the utter awfulness in the outside world, if only for a couple hours. If you watch it, you won’t regret it.
And it just goes to show: you never know how or when the Watchwords we’re given will come in handy.
(T-398)