“Gak oleh putus asa rek!! Ancene urip kui ngunu iku. Masio lunyu kudu tetep menek.” — Mbah Nun. (“You must never despair, friends!! That is simply what life is like. Even if the slope is slippery, you must keep climbing.”)
Ojo Putus Asa is the refusal to despair, because life is exactly what it is — hard, uneven, and sometimes slippery. Masio lunyu, kudu tetep menek: even though it’s slippery, you must keep climbing. Despair is not an option, because giving up means stopping in the middle of a life that itself never stops.
Picture a climber on a clay slope after the rain. Every time he plants his foot, it slides him back a few spans. What separates this climber from a defeated person is not his feet but his hands, constantly searching for the next hold. The slipperiness of the slope is a fact, not a verdict. Slipping is part of the climb, not proof that the summit was never meant for us. As long as the hands keep reaching and the feet keep finding purchase, we have not fallen — we are climbing more slowly.
In daily life this principle works through small things. When the business has not yet paid off, when studies hit a wall, when the heart is exhausted from rejection: you may rest, you may complain, you may cry for one night. But getting up is still mandatory. Break the big problem into the next single foothold — do not stare at the whole slope at once, because what usually crushes people is not the steepness of the climb but the size of its shadow.
And this is exactly where the principle meets another one: we do not climb alone. The strongest handhold is the conviction that Allah never wastes the effort of His servant. As long as there is breath, there is a foothold. Masio lunyu, kudu tetep menek.