A few weeks ago, as the theme for my weekly goal-setting in my journal, I wrote down: Iterate and indurate. “Iterate” is a word many of us know, but not “indurate”. As an adjective, it means “hardened, not soft”. As a transitive verb, it means “to make hard; as, extreme heat indurates clay; some fossils are indurated by exposure to the air”; as an intransitive verb, “to grow hard; to harden, or become hard; as, clay indurates by drying, and by heat”.

I keep coming back to that word. There are versions of being indurate that would be terrible — Webster’s Unabridged 1913 offers “without sensibility; unfeeling; obdurate” as a secondary definition of the adjective, and I do not want to be those things are regards my family or friends or church or the plight of suffering people around me in the world. There are also versions that that can be very good, though: a solidity that can endure the ups and downs of life and endure, a hardness that can push through suffering or even what I recently described elsewhere as the trudging drudgery of life.

It is that latter version of the word I had in mind when I wrote it down all those weeks ago, and that I keep coming back to: equally for marathon training as for the slog that is applying to (so many) different jobs or the tedium of getting through edits for The Rust Programming Language. To be baked like clay, made something of good use by the heat: that is what I want.