About Showing Up

Funny thing - when you first hear the phrase “show up,” it sounds almost too plain to matter. Like someone handing you a dull tool and insisting it can carve a masterpiece. We’re seduced by the idea of brilliance, not discipline. Fireworks, not candles. But life, in its stubborn wisdom, keeps proving the opposite.

The universe has a soft spot for the one who returns.

Not the prodigy who flashes once, but the persistent soul who shows up again, especially on days when everything in them wants to disappear.

I learned this in a dusty classroom, long before I cared about philosophy or productivity. There was a boy - not the smartest, certainly not the quickest. I remember thinking he’d never catch up. Yet every morning he arrived early, notebook open, pencil sharpened like a ritual. Others coasted on talent, he leaned on presence.

Years later, someone told me he now runs a firm abroad. Not genius. Just presence. Relentless presence.

That memory still sits with me like a pebble in the shoe - small, but impossible to ignore.

What nobody admits is that most greatness is painfully dull up close.

The poet rewriting the same line until sunrise.

The athlete running laps after the crowd goes home.

The entrepreneur making cold calls that never get returned.

It’s not glamorous. There’s no soundtrack. Just breath, sweat, repetition. And somehow - almost quietly - that repetition becomes character.

Character becomes momentum. Momentum becomes destiny.

The mind loves drama. It waits for motivation like rain in summer - hoping for clouds, skipping the well. But showing up doesn’t ask for inspiration. It just asks for presence. A simple, inconvenient yes. Some days you show up with joy, other days with resentment, exhaustion, doubt.

But you show up.

And in that act - that steady, almost stubborn devotion - something in you begins to harden, like steel forged by friction.

I think of life like a long, unmarked trail through a dense forest. You don’t clear it in one heroic charge. You carve it one footstep at a time. Some days the path opens like grace. Other days it hides behind fog and resistance.

But the only way out is forward. The only way forward is return. Again.

And again.

And again.

Quietly, consistently, even when no one is watching. Especially when no one is watching.

There’s a strange kind of power in that.

A person who keeps showing up becomes immovable in a world addicted to quitting. They carry a calm that can’t be bought. A patience that feels like strength. They’re not loud. They’re not dramatic.

They’re like monsoon water carving rock - slow, gentle, inevitable.

So here’s what I wonder - what could your life become if you just kept showing up?

Not perfectly. Not passionately.

Just consistently.

One more step on days you want to stop. One more rep when tired. One more page when bored. The world may not applaud you now.

But time always bends to the one who endures.

Destiny is rarely a lightning strike. More often, it’s a slow burn.

The match is small.

But you - you keep it lit.