Everything Worth Having Takes Longer Than You Think
Category: Reflections | Reading time: ~6 minutes
We live in a world that has quietly convinced us that speed is the same thing as progress.
Same-day delivery. Instant streaming. Swipe right, swipe left. Results in four weeks or your money back. There is an entire economy built on the promise that you should not have to wait — that waiting is a flaw in the system, something to be engineered away.
And then you sit down and try to learn something that requires everything you have. And you discover, slowly, that it will not be rushed. That which is worth doing takes time.
This is what Vijayadashami has always known.
The stories we return to on this day are as much about the journey as they are about the moment of victory.
Rama did not defeat Ravana on a comfortable timeline. He spent years in the forest — not because he chose exile, but because dharma required it. He walked away from a kingdom he had earned. He watched his wife taken from him. He made alliances with people he had never met. He fought a war across an ocean for a city he could not yet see.
Durga battled Mahishasura for nine nights. Nine. Not one decisive confrontation, but night after night of warfare — the demon shape-shifting, evading, reforming. She did not overcome him in a single inspired moment. She wore down what refused to yield, until the tenth day came.
Do the work. Release the outcome. This is perhaps the most radical idea in any ancient text — and also the most difficult to live.
Instant gratification has a cost that does not appear on the receipt.
We are the first generation in human history to have almost everything available immediately. And we have never been more anxious, more impatient, or more uncertain about who we are.
There is a connection there worth sitting with.
When everything comes quickly, we never develop the capacity to wait. When effort produces immediate reward, we never learn what we are made of when it doesn't. When we can abandon anything the moment it becomes difficult — a course, a relationship, a practice, a pursuit — we never discover what lives on the other side of difficulty.
There are things outside your control. This is not a failure.
One of the most uncomfortable truths any serious pursuit will eventually teach you is that your effort and your outcome are not always proportional. You can do everything right and still face difficulty. You can prepare completely and still encounter the unexpected. The world does not reward virtue on a predictable schedule.
We tend to tell ourselves — and our children — that if you work hard enough, success is guaranteed. But that is not quite true, and somewhere inside us we know it. What is true is something better: that sustained effort, over time, with integrity, makes you into someone who can carry whatever comes. The outcome may not be what you planned. The person you become in the pursuit of it is real regardless.
Resilience is not returning to who you were before.
We often speak about resilience as bouncing back — as if the goal is to be unchanged by difficulty. But the people in the great stories are always changed by what they go through. Rama returns to Ayodhya a different king than the prince who left. Arjuna picks up his bow again but he is not the same man who dropped it. The Pandavas reclaim their kingdom but they have seen things in exile that no palace education could have taught them.
The bearing is not blind. It is conscious. You know what you are bearing. You know why. And that knowing changes the quality of the endurance itself.
This is different from simply surviving difficulty. It is being transformed by it — and choosing, consciously, to let that transformation make you more rather than less.
In dance, this transformation is visible. A student who has been through the frustration of a piece that wouldn't come, the vulnerability of a performance that didn't go as planned, the discipline of beginning again when every instinct says to stop — that student moves differently. There is something in the quality of their attention, their relationship to the work, their presence in the space, that cannot be faked and cannot be taught directly. It can only be lived.
On sacrifice.
Every serious pursuit requires you to give things up. Time, comfort, the easy road, the approval of people who don't understand what you're doing or why. This is not a problem to be solved. It is the nature of commitment.
The word sacrifice comes from the Latin sacer — sacred — and facere — to make. To sacrifice is to make something sacred. What you give up in service of something you believe in is not lost. It is transformed into the substance of the thing you are building.
Every early morning. Every class you attended when you didn't want to. Every repetition of something you had already done a thousand times. Every moment you chose the practice over the easier alternative. These are not sacrifices in the sense of things taken from you. They are investments in the only currency that compounds without limit: who you are becoming.
What this day is really asking of us.
Vijayadashami — Dasami, the tenth day — is a day of victory. But the nine nights of Navaratri that precede it are a reminder that every tenth day has nine nights before it.
The invitation is not to rush toward the tenth day. It is to be fully present in the nine nights. To bring dhṛti — that quality of determined, patient, courageous persistence — to each one.
Not because the outcome is guaranteed. It isn't.
Not because the path will be easy. It won't be.
But because what you build inside yourself on the way there — the faith, the resilience, the patience, the capacity to bear what cannot be controlled and continue anyway — is more valuable than any single destination.
The path worth taking always takes longer than you think.
And it is worth every moment of the taking.
Vijayadashami greetings from Nrityasagara — Bharatanatyam classes for children and adults in Sydney's Hills District.
— Amesha Darshana, Founder, Nrityasagara School of Dance