Don't Look For the Easy Life
Trevor Hampel posted today about his search to find the source of the quote "Life isn't meant to be easy". As so often happens, reading this post and the full quote got me thinking - a thoroughly dangerous activity, I know.
The first definition of easy in The Free Dictionary is "Capable of being accomplished or acquired with ease; posing no difficulty". Looked at in this context, ease implies there is no challenge. Our times of accomplishment don't happen when life is easy. Personal growth doesn't occur when we stay in the area of what we know. Growth occurs when we stretch, when we look beyond what we know and how we see ourselves to create something new. To quote Star Trek, our lifetime mission is "To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before." We can't do that when we're sitting at home watching TV and eating potato chips.
Whether life is meant to be easy or not, I don't know. I have my suspicions that we would have quickly done what we could to take the ease out of life. Life is challenge, movement from the known into the unknown. There is time enough for easy when your bones are resting in their grave.
I am pleased to have sparked an idea for an article from you Rick.
You make some very good points. Some people, it seems, have some enormous challenges in their lives. Others seem to breeze or drift through life without any apparent difficulties. But scratch beneath the surface and every life has its fair share of hardships, challenges, difficulties and tragedies. In our own case it has been illness, both for my wife and myself.
It is how one responds to these challenges that is the key factor. Difficulties can bring out the best - and worst - in people. At best, they develop perseverence which develops character. I can't say it better than the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans (chapter 5).
Hi Trevor,
Thank you for the spark!
In some ways an easy life is the most difficult challenge. When we have external challenges such as an illness, death, natural disaster, we are forced to respond, and as you say, we can show our best or our worst. But at least we are showing who we are. People who call such things tests are speaking truer than they know.
When we don't have the external challenge, we have to motivate ourselves from within to change, to look at where we feel we are lacking, and where we feel we are strong, and do something about it.