There Is No Resting On Your Laurels

The ancient Greeks used to bestow a laurel wreath on the head of a champion or great scholar. From that came the idiom, “to rest on your laurels” meaning you just don’t try anymore now that you have gotten the wreath.  
The problem is that laurels can’t be spent, eaten or traded for cash so what good are they. As humans we just can’t rest on our laurels we have constantly got to keep trying and improving.  
I, for one, don’t have any laurels so I don’t have anything to think I can rest on. But I know that I can’t slow down or stop trying in everything or I slide backwards and backwards is worse than resting.  
My friend Suzanne ran the New York Half Marathon yesterday. She has never been a runner, but she has children who are good runners. She wanted to raise money for Summer Search, a program that helps low income teenagers transform what they believe is possible for themselves. So Suzanne transformed herself into a runner. Her motto for this run was “You can do more than you think you can.”
After her run she wrote, “I wasn’t a runner before I set this goal for myself, and today I have the medal to prove that, actually I AM a runner! Not everything is possible, but I know now that more is possible than I believed.”
Suzanne has been a TV producer, produced three successful children and could have rested on her laurels, but she didn’t. She picked a goal that was hard, to start running at age fifty-five and then on a bitterly cold day run 13.6 miles in about two hours. That is more than I imagine I could do in five hours.
If you want to contribute to her fundraising it is not too late and you can help kids too, http://www.crowdrise.com/summersearchnychalf16/fundraiser/Suzanneworden.
I wish I had been in NYC to see her at the finish line, but I did get to watch her progress live on my I-pad. I was inspired as her little initials kept moving along the route of the race, never stopping or even slowing down much. It inspires me to not rest, to keep going and try to do more than I imagined.