I hope you had a bit of a break or change of pace while the school holidays were on. I want you to recall a time when you did something really hard. Something that didn’t happen easily, and even though you thought you were prepared for it, it just kept throwing up challenges. A few years ago, I did the community bike ride for the Tour Down Under. I had been training and the ride up to the Barossa went ok. Then a friend and I decided we would ride home as well. All up that day we did over 200km on the bike, quite a bit of it through the hills. I remember the cramps, the aching, the huffing and puffing, and then the tremendous sense of achievement as the 200 kilometres clicked over. The desire to call and get someone to come and pick us up was strong on several occasions during that ride, but the encouragement of a friend, a few conversations with myself that I could do this, and a huge dose of perseverance helped get me home.

Perseverance is an interesting concept. It reminds me of a news story I read recently. Imagine if you will, a place where days are 24 and a half hours long, years go for the equivalent of 687 Earth days, on September 28, 2021 (a couple of weeks ago), it had a high of -21 degrees C and a low of -78 degrees C, and that is in early summer in the northern hemisphere. The atmosphere is made up of 96% carbon dioxide, 1.9% argon, 1.9% nitrogen and traces of oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane and water vapour. It has huge dust storms that at times grow so large as to cover the entire planet. That place is the Jezero Crater on the planet Mars. On February 18 this year, a rover named Perseverance touched down on Mars. It travelled 470 million kilometres to get there after leaving Earth on July 30, 2020. The rover has various instruments and equipment on board to gather all sorts of information and samples about the atmosphere, geology (on, as well as under the ground), conditions and potential life forms. (mars.nasa.gov) Now I know that this rover is not human, but I think the name that it was given by a Grade 7 student, Alexander Mather, is a very good one. If you look at the challenges that faced the people working on this project, they must have been huge, and there would have been many times when they felt like saying “Enough. I can’t do this anymore, there just doesn’t seem to be a solution,” and yet they persevered.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but the world in which we are raising our children (and living in ourselves) is firmly focused on making things easy, quick and convenient. The downside of this is that we are tempted make a path for our children that is smooth, free of complication and easy. It is my opinion that we do our kids and ourselves a disservice if we construct that for our children. I am not saying we lay them open to experiences and situations that they don’t have the resources to deal with, what I am saying is that we all learn at the point of challenge, whether that be Mathematics or relationships, Reading or dealing with disappointment, and one of the best character traits we can help our children develop is perseverance. That development doesn’t happen by creating easy paths, or giving up when things don’t go our way.

I love that NASA got Perseverance to take a selfie. It is almost a celebration of what can happen if we push through difficulties, uncomfortable times and seemingly unsolvable problems. As we push towards the end of another school year, let us do so with perseverance so that it becomes such a part of us and our children, that it is our standard mode of operating, rather than avoiding or pretending challenges don’t exist.

Welcome back to Term 4, and have another great week with your kids,

Mark B