One thing it is so easy to forget in persevering is the existence of happenstance.

Because it takes consistent diligent effort, it is so easy to slip into the mindset that it is only one’s consistent diligent effort that exists.

A kind of siege mentality develops from such a state, making perseverance a kind of ironman-like endurance race, a continual suffering, a loneliness.

Indeed I have been making consistent diligent efforts to develop a studio rhythm such that without a ‘studio outside’ I can still access the studio inside.

But one of the most beautiful aspects of perseverance is that somethings, perhaps often, it meets with the happenstances that no personal efforts can conjure.

Like today, when the very first day of my summer rest, I find that the roadworks outside my home, the metal-on-rock cacophony of which has oppressed every week day for months from 7am in the morning, and from which I have been endlessly escaping to work at the local (also hectic) café, have been completed, dismantled and entirely disappeared. And my home, rather than being uninhabitable, has become a sanctuary.