Category: Growth

Gumption

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Gumption.
I love that word – I discovered it many years ago in a weird & wonderful 1970’s book, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
Gumption – I love the sound of it, the idea of it, the feel of it in the mouth.
I just googled for synonyms of gumption. The first link listed: initiative, resourcefulness, enterprise, imagination, ingenuity, inventiveness …
Y-e-e-e-s, kind of, but that’s not the gumption that Robert Pirsig vividly chronicled during his epic back-roads, back-country-America motorcycle-adventure with his 11 year old son.
When their motorbike broke down in the middle of nowhere and they had to fix it themselves or suffer potentially fatal consequences.
That’s not the gumption that drove Pirsig to keep submitting the draft of his book even after 121 rejections! (it subsequently climbed to the the best-seller list and stayed there for decades).
The gumption that Pirsig so deftly described in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and that he embodied in his determination to get this cult-classic published, is the definition that hollered out at me from my screen, after I clicked on vocabulary.com:
“fortitude and determination“.
Yes!
With synonyms listed as: “backbone, grit, guts“.
Yes!
I’ve detailed Pirsig’s epic description of gumption to countless clients. Clients battling through the multiple misfortunes that no-one on our planet is exempt from.
And yes, of course we need empathy, compassion and kindness to help us prevail against adversity. But, ultimately, to overcome the challenges that Life so carelessly seems to throw at us – what we have to have, what is a sine qua non, an absolute pre-condition, is gumption.
Backbone.
Grit.
Guts.
Gumption.

What we Need

“You can’t always get what you want. But if you try, you might just find you get what you need.”

– The Rolling Stones.

Life’s Complexity

“Life is complex.
Each one of us must make his own path through life.
There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers.
The right road for one is the wrong road for another.
The journey of life is not paved in blacktop [bitumen]; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs.
It is a rocky path through the wilderness.”

M. Scott Peck. 

The Blessing of Tears

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears for they are the rain upon the blinding dust of earth overlying our hard hearts.”

– Charles Dickens (in Great Expectations).

Fixing the Movie

“Trying to fix the world is like trying to change a movie by manipulating the movie screen. The world as we know it is simply a screen onto which we project our thoughts. Until we change those thoughts, the movie stays the same.

Whenever our outer world remains stuck, it is incumbent upon us to look, not outward, but inward. It is a call to find the places in ourselves where we are holding on to old ways.”

– Marianne Williamson

A Full Life

“A full life is a life full of pain.
But the only alternative is not to live fully, or not to live at all.”

M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Travelled.

Grown-Up

‘By the time it came to the edge of the Forest the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.’

– A.A. Milne. (from Winnie the Pooh).

Personal Growth

Inevitably, each of us will reach the moment when the place we have felt most comfortable becomes so uncomfortable that we feel as if we are suffocating in the stale air of our own history.
Most of us will arrive at some point in our lives when the world with which we are most familiar no longer works for us.
We are meant to outgrow ourselves; indeed, we can no more avoid this development than we can stop the ageing process.
The only question is how gracefully – and healthily – we will handle the transition.”

– Caroline Myss

The Search for Our True Selves

“The search for the true self, or higher self, is at the core of all human motivation. Whether we know it or not, we are searching for this connection, and the drive is always present, even if subconscious.”

– David Cumes.

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑