The Daily Word 

          for Saturday, January 23, 2021

#inspiration, #inspirational-thoughts, #writer, #reader

This morning I awoke and immediately thought of what word to emphasize today: grit. 

grit - noun - stubborn courage

Before retiring in June of 2019, I taught British literature to students in the eleventh grade at a suburban high school in Jersey. As a way of focusing their minds on inspirational concepts, I segregated a small number of relevant, resonant abstractions and had the students define the words and then create eye-catching posters to advertise them. Grit was a choice that somehow confounded my students as they couldn't quite wrap their minds around "stubborn courage."

 Luckily, we had all witnessed a superior example the day before at an outdoor prep rally held on the football field. The only male on the cheerleading squad, Shakir, a proud, gay, African American student–whom I had the pleasure of teaching twice–decided to make a statement and did a series of flips across the length of the field. Grit could have been this particular student's last name that morning. In fact, it could've been every morning since Shakir has never been daunted when it comes down to displaying exactly who he is. As far as I know, he is still the avatar of grit as a student at Rutgers and is still managing those sequential round-offs.

Do you have what it takes to define grit? If you are surviving this pandemic well, then you may already have it. Perhaps most of us do. We just don't think about it.