“Work until you can’t work any more. Then work harder.”
There is a certain PhD website that will go unnamed but I’ve been a member for a long time and there, my friends, is my tag line. Work until you can’t work anymore. Then work harder. I believe that and more importantly I lived that. I hold fast as truth that we cannot always run full speed through life, that we require periods of rest and recuperation. But I see no reason to just sit around through life!
I see my tagline every day as I am on the site every day but this morning it caused me to pause a moment. I ran full-out to finish my dissertation and now I am in a period of recuperation from that race. In May, I was able to start going back to ballet class and as you recall, all went well… for a couple of weeks. Then my foot started to give me problems. Since then I’ve been back and forth to classes in spurts and starts. The foot creating issues where I don’t want them and making me question once again if my role in ballet is in a seat in the audience. It has been determined that I have not damaged it further but that my foot, like the rest of my body, has gotten weak and if you remember, I had weak foot muscles to begin with.
Starting last week I began to get up at 0530 in the morning to work out before heading off to my day job so that I can get my physio-training in each day and I repeat a short version of it in the evening after ballet class. Even so, I’ve been feeling very discouraged as of late because the progress as I see it is minimal. But today I reminded myself – work until you can’t work any more… and then work harder. I am listening to my body and making sure to watch for signs of injury but I’m not backing off of challenges because therein comes the change.
I have struggled through challenges before and I will struggle through challenges again. The question isn’t can I work harder but will I work harder? And the answer is simple, yes. I will work until I can’t work anymore and then I will work even harder because I want to. I want to.
~Let’s dance.
THE 109th BEAD 
Don’t worry if you feel that your progress is slow. Sometimes it is, even if you work extremely hard. When I was a kid, I seemed to be able to do anything my ballet teacher asked me to do, but now (in my forties) it is like my mind has to wait til my body is ready, too.
Thank you, Paulina! It’s very hard to be positive about the work when I’m not really seeing results. I know that it’s making a difference. I have been away from dance for a long, long time. Patience is not the easiest thing to embrace but I guess that’s part of working hard too, right?!
My ageing body is teaching me patience and perseverance. It was not easy at all to realize that new things do not come so easily as before. I believe that not only our bodies, but also our minds learn important lessons in adult dance classes.
I couldn’t agree with you more! Very well put, thank you! 😀 ❤