Patience is a difficult business.

No one gets it better than me. I'm my mother's daughter after all, and patience was never one of her virtues. Waiting has always been an onerous endeavor for us, as it is for most people.

As children, we - the universal "we" - were told, "good things will come to those who wait." But it's so difficult to remain tenacious, to keep our forbearance, self-restraint and resolution in-tact when those things we are aimed at feeling so out of reach, so impossibly far away.

We psyche ourselves out, convince ourselves that these lofty hopes of ours are unobtainable, merely because they are distant. We often lack the capacity to step back and look at the "big picture." We are insatiable. It is only the present and near-future which concern us, only the things in our immediate line of sight. But we must press ourselves to peel away a little, to look further down the road as well. We must allow ourselves to see that our efforts will culminate.

There will be a payday, a light at the end of the tunnel.

If we keep ourselves assiduous, determined and driven, we will be unstoppable. Hope drives us. It is that last chance, that last sliver of possibility that we will win in the ring even with bruised ribs.

And hope is tied tightly to patience. Hope brings patience worth and significance. The hope of thriving motivates the act of patience. Without them, where is our staying power?

We must push through that fear of failure, we must remain persistent, even when our aspirations seem so impossibly far away.

Because if we give up now, we might lose everything we've been working towards. Our efforts would never culminate, never come to fruition. If we lose sight of what is ahead if we lose our hope, we very well may be giving up on that future completely, and then what would we be working towards? What would it all be for?

It's like the old fable "The Tortoise and the Hare;" the term "slow and steady does it" applies here. We may be condemned to drudgery and moil for now, but all that labor and hard work will pay off.

Good things will take time, they often do not come easy.

And even though it's hard to remain solitary and unwavering in our convictions, the knowledge that we are working towards something, and with each day, growing nearer and nearer to that thing, will help us to keep our steady resolve. It will give us worth and purpose.

So please, remain firm, the day will come.