The years teach you this:
success isn’t earned at the finish,
but in the days no one remembers.
No one told me success would move like winter...
so slow you notice the thaw
only when your breath no longer clouds the glass.
I was ready for labor,
for the calloused hands,
the salt sting in the eyes.
But not for the silence,
the long reckonings in the half-light
between one assignment and the next,
when purpose feels borrowed
and you mistake waiting for peace.
_______________
I. The Uniform Years
In those days, I chased promotion
the way frost follows shade -
inch by inch, never certain of the sun.
The barracks smelled of polish and fatigue;
each morning’s inspection a kind of prayer
for recognition that never came.
Discipline was a drumbeat I obeyed
even in my sleep.
I thought one more stripe
would mean direction,
but each reward was only another march
through sameness.
Sometimes, polishing boots at midnight,
I’d catch my face in the leather -
blurred, obedient -
and wonder who was watching whom.
_______________
II. The Hospital Nights
Then came the years of humming lights,
machines that breathed for others.
The ICU taught patience
and the arithmetic of mercy -
how many heartbeats to a miracle,
how few between alarms.
We worked through the small hours
where time forgets its shape,
moving room to room
like ghosts with clipboards.
Coffee, antiseptic, the click of shoes -
the rhythm of endurance.
Between codes, I’d stare out the window
at a parking lot glazed with frost,
thinking revelation must be out there,
in the world still moving.
I never saw it pass me by,
folded into each quiet breath
we coaxed back to life.
_______________
III. The Roadwork
After that, the road...
miles of divided yellow
stretching through counties that never changed.
Motel curtains, the same thin coffee,
TV voices murmuring like prayer wheels.
I learned the geography of loneliness:
exit signs, gas-station lights,
the faint hum of a world I watched but didn’t join.
I told myself I was gathering purpose,
but I was only tracing circles,
waiting for something to name me.
Sometimes revelation rides beside you
for a thousand miles
and never says a word.
_______________
IV. The Ordinary Triumph
Now I know the part they skip:
how arrival looks like nothing at all -
a lamp left burning,
a pencil worn to its stub,
boots drying by the door.
No applause,
no sudden clarity,
only the steady pulse
of a life still moving forward.
Discipline is not the whip or the clock.
It’s the hand that keeps writing
when the fire is out,
the quiet voice that returns at dawn
and says, simply, again.
And I,
barely awake,
but faithful still,
turn toward the light
that hasn’t yet arrived.
_______________
Afterword: The Education of Endurance
I used to believe purpose arrived the way a trumpet sounds - sudden, bright, unmistakable. It never did. What came instead were long stretches of work: years of drills, of shift changes, of wheels humming through the dark. At first I mistook repetition for futility, but over time I learned that persistence is its own kind of revelation. The steady motion through confusion, through fatigue, through aimless miles, becomes a prayer the body says even when the mind has stopped believing.
In uniform I learned obedience; in hospitals, mercy; on the road, solitude. Each season trained a different part of me to listen - not for applause, not for reward, but for the faint hum of meaning that hides inside ordinary tasks: the smell of polish, the quiet of a patient’s room at 3 a.m., the thin light under a motel door. These are the places where endurance speaks, and where I first began to understand that grace is not a destination but a way of walking.
Success, I see now, isn’t what waits at the end of effort. It’s what forms inside it: the willingness to keep showing up when the world feels emptied of promise. To rinse the thermos, lace the boots, turn the key again. To write one more line. That’s the part they skip when they tell the story, the part that looks like nothing, but changes everything.
GBS jr
2025
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