The courage to move on

A few days ago, in a conversation, field workers were talking about the phrase ‘wiping the dust from one’s feet’—the concept that a worker needs to move on from an ‘unproductive field.’ They had to have the “courage to move on.”

I have fallen to musing about this phrase:

• the courage to move on implies the “hope of redemption” - the idea that whatever story is being written, it’s not over, and there’s a good ending to it later, after the trials and darkness are finished.
• even thinking about the surge in dystopian stories in the 2000s, they didn’t end in complete tragedy. We humans seem to have this built-in understanding that the story will finally break toward the dawn.
• There’s a Japanese proverb I’ve run across, which if I’ve gotten right—Nanakorobi yaoki, which means, “fall seven times, stand up eight.” In proverbs and human relations we prize resilience. Resilience is essentially this courage to stand up and move on, to “keep moving forward.”
• Sometimes we have to have the courage to move on while we still have options. In a sense we either have the ‘decision pain’ of moving on when the options aren’t clear (stay or go?) or the physical pain that forces the decision (we stayed too long, should have moved on earlier).