Inching Forward

There are many times where it seems that no matter how mightily we strive to make progress in our lives, at the end of a hard day's labor we have moved forward scarcely more than an inch. We may be so discouraged by such a tiny amount of progress that we uncharitably round that inch down to zero and write the day off as an utter waste. We may even come to the conclusion that if the very best we can manage is a single inch forward, we might as well save ourselves all of the grief and pain and toil and not try at all. What good will one inch forward do us when we have miles and miles to go yet? In Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, Abbe Faria explains to Edmond Dantes that he would consider it a productive day if he had managed to carve so much as a square inch of the rock and rock hard cement after an entire day of scraping and scratching at the unyielding stone. Moving forward an inch a day may only get you twenty or thirty feet in a year, which is hardly impressive if you are going for a walk, but such a distance would be impressive indeed if you were carving your way through stone with nothing but a spoon to aid you. If it takes us five years to carve our way out of our prison, then is not the freedom that awaits us worth every effort, even if we wear ourselves out and only advance half an inch in a single day? However slow our progress seems to us, every millimeter forward is a victory, and is infinitely faster than doing nothing at all. It can take the better part of two years for the plate tectonics, upon which the continents and all of us rest, to move as far as an inch. This seems to us as if the continents aren't moving at all, but even if they aren't moving much more than a foot every couple of decades, they have still been persistently moving for long enough for whole oceans - thousands of miles across - to have sprouted up between them. I know that every inch counts on our journey, and we should always be fighting for that next inch forward.