I’m struck recently by the immense power and importance of a very simple idea…
If you have a mountain to climb, all you really have to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other. I’ve enough experience of climbing real mountains to know that actually it is true, and possibly you do as well.
But here’s the thing, and the point of mentioning this…
When you start, it doesn’t feel like it’s true. Putting one foot in front of the other doesn’t seem like it’ll be enough. The mountain seems just too big to be overcome with such small steps.
But it will be. Little by little, you make progress and after a while, you look round and you can see you’re not at the bottom anymore and the top really is a bit closer.
Then it’s a bit easier to keep going.
But in the beginning, everything depends on believing, and it takes real presence to keep that belief in place in yourself and other people.
Quite often, we don’t start up a mountain, whether literal or metaphorical, because we don’t want to do the work of believing.