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Little Steps Add Up to Big Things
The odometer in my car recently reached 150,000 miles. I saw the milestone approaching and yet – you guessed it – forget to look down at the right moment to see it roll over from 149,999.9.
Watching 150,002.9 roll over into 150,003.0 was not nearly as exciting, I don’t imagine.
Granted, 150,003 miles is nothing exceptional for a Honda Civic. Still, it did take some perseverance as it is a 2003 model.
“Perseverance is not a long race,” Walter Elliot, a Scottish politician once noted, “it is many short races one after another.”
Nor is it one long drive, but rather many short trips – to the grocery; to drop kids off at school; to run errands; to here and to there.
I had a personal odometer that measures perseverance roll over 10 days ago when my running streak reached 5,000 consecutive days. This time, I was aware when nines rolled over to zeros.
My run streak, like my Honda, is a 2003 model. Certainly I did not lace up my Nikes on July 7 of that year with the intent of running at least 3 miles every single day for the next 13-plus years.
Even when I noticed I had an unintentional streak of more than 100 days, I didn’t set a goal of 1,000 consecutive days much less 10 straight years. Rather, I set a goal that I could see on the horizon – 365 days in a row.
When I reached the one-year milestone, I decided to try for the two-year milestone. Momentum took over. All the while, however, my real goal, my real focus, was on today’s run.
Similarly, cinema’s streak runner extraordinaire, Forrest Gump, did not set out intending to run for three years, two months and 15 days. Rather, he was sitting on his porch one day when “for no particular reason” he decided to go for “a little run.”
A lot of little runs took Forrest from South Carolina to Santa Monica and then back across the country to the Marshall Point Lighthouse in Maine before turning around again and running all the way to Utah’s Monument Valley before he abruptly stopped, saying: “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.”
My own little runs during my streak have added up to just over 48,000 miles. My next goal is to figuratively run from Ventura to Chicago, a distance that will push my streak mileage total above two trips around the earth.
If I successfully “reach” Chicago, I think I’ll head on to the Marshall Point Lighthouse. . .
Something else that got me to thinking about perseverance recently was a brick wall. Specifically, the sight of a brick wall being built. Each time I drove past, the waist-high wall grew a little longer. It wasn’t built in one hour or one day, but rather over many days of eight hours of toil.
The wall was a perfect example of John Wooden’s maxim, “Little things make big things happen.” Little bricks, one laid next to another, one on top of another, makes a big wall.
Perhaps my favorite visual of little things making big things happen was a story that golfing legend Chi Chi Rodriguez once told me.
“When I was a young boy we had a little field that was overgrown with bamboo trees,” Rodriguez recalled of his childhood in Puerto Rico. “My father wanted to plant corn, but clearing the bamboo would have taken a month. He didn’t have the time because of his job.
“So every night when he came home from work, my father would cut down a single piece of bamboo.”
Chi Chi paused, and then emphasized: “Just one piece.”
Another pause. And a smile.
“The very next spring, we had corn on our dinner table.”
A longer pause. And a wider smile.
“The lesson is that nothing is impossible,” continued Rodriquez. “The bamboo story to me is the secret to success. If you really want something and you set your mind to it and work hard enough, one by one, little by little, miracles happen.”
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.
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