When I sat down to write this post, I struggled to find a title. Using the word “failure” produced something of a visceral reaction in me. Associating that word with Trinitas seemed like a bad marketing move. I decided to risk it. Our virtue focus this quarter is Perseverance. Our hall and classroom posters display a definition from Plato: “a bearing up under labor for the sake of what is honorable.” We all know perseverance involves labor; this post explores the bookends of that definition: the “bearing up” and the “for the sake of what is honorable” parts.
Taking the latter part first—what does Plato mean by “for the sake of what is honorable”? Hard work is always aimed at something. Sometimes we need to pause and ask, “What am I working so hard for?” Asking this question can produce all kinds of responses, from staying the course to relatively minor adjustments to existential transformations. It can be a motivating question—remembering a goal of running a marathon can get one out of bed on a cold, rainy Saturday morning. It can be a course-altering question—an examination of our family’s hectic weekly pace during middle school years led us to cut back on some activities (good as those activities all were). Notice that perseverance, with its “for the sake of what is honorable” framing, may actually lead someone to quit something. Perseverance that does not aim at something good or that comes at too heavy of a cost to other goods or better goods is not a virtue but rather the vice of obdurateness.