The Art of Persistence and Giving Up

You know, there are moments in life when, despite your insistence, things just don't happen your way. Let's imagine a situation. You are at a bus station, waiting for the bus to take you home (like me today). You know from memory, or just by the sign post, that the 390 should eventually do just that. Yet, minutes go by and no 390 is coming. Other buses keep arriving, picking up the others waiting at the bus stop. But no 390. You are tired, spent, hungry, and envious of all the other people who got their ride home. Will you get yours? Perhaps you should give up waiting. After all, you could just walk for fifteen minutes to the nearest tube station - a ride that is usually longer and more expensive, but now perhaps more reasonable. Yet, there is a mixture of will, stubborness or laziness keeping you in place. Come on, the bus should come any minute now. Any minute. Except it, just as stubbornly, doesn't want to.

Now, being generally more stubborn than a bus, I waited and waited until eventually it came. But it was a mixed blessing. The bus, as it turns out, had a premature termination stop way before my home. So I had to get down and wait for another bus. I arrived perhaps one hour and a half later than I planned, pissed off and all that. Was it worth the wait? Obviously not - getting the tube would have gotten me home much faster and much happier.

There must be an art, which I'm willing to explore, about knowing when to give up and when to persist. Will persistence finally break resistance? Or will the pressure make resistance harder? Or then again, aren't you paralyzed by the fear that, just when you give up on the bus and walk to the tube, the bus comes and you are too far to catch it?