Why Isn’t It All Easy?

It doesn’t take us long to go through life without pondering this question. Life doesn’t come easy, but for some reason, what does come easy is the questioning of why life isn’t easy.

So what gives?

When trying to find an answer for this, it’s pretty easy to lean back on some broad and fundamental worldview-related answers like “We live in a fallen world”, “You aren’t the one making the rules” or “Sometimes people just suck”, which are all true! However, the irony of these easy answers actually points us back to the thesis question of why things aren’t easy. What I mean here is that while these answers are truthful and simple, they aren’t quite satisfactory in explaining this situation.

So how do we explain it?

I’m not going to gratify you with a comprehensive and lengthy explanation of this phenomenon (sorry, folks), but what I am going to do is offer another way of looking at the challenge of unease. Maybe… Just maybe, the reason why things aren’t easy is because you keep looking for ways to prove them to be easy. What I mean by this is that maybe we aren’t learning the lesson of complexity, difficulty, or arduous resolution like we need to.

I know I’ve done this whole write-up about shortcuts and how shortcuts can be both based but risk being cringe, but hear me out. The reality of things being “difficult difficult lemon difficult” pushes us toward the more essential reality that we have got to learn to deal with our problems. Sometimes there won’t be a shortcut, cheat, easy way out, or simple solution. Sometimes you have to humble yourself down to the repeating issue that you can’t seem to understand. Sometimes the solution isn’t outside yourself, it’s inside yourself.

Cool, but why?

WHAT IF THE KEY YOU NEED IS BEHIND THE THING YOU KEEP TRYING TO WALK AWAY FROM?

I hate to admit it, but sometimes the thing you need to do is the thing that just kinda sucks to do? If we expect ourselves to make choices that matter, choices that will benefit us, or choices that will make life go any better than poorly, we are going to have to look at the difficulty of life and ask “what is the lesson I haven’t learned, which I need to learn in order to move forward?” It’s honestly that simple. Religious virtues will affirm this, and any secular motivation worth its salt will also support this fact.

Conclusion

Sometimes you just need to eat your vegeatables, bro. Sometimes you need to admit that you try too hard to make things too easy and need to relax a bit and just make the hard choice. It’s paradoxical, but why would you put 100% effort into trying to turn things into 80% of the work, when you could just put in 100% effort into something and take 40% of the resources? Let’s stop being silly with ourselves and each other and get the work done for once, fellas.

My aim in this blog is to speak to a more… practical issue than an ideological one. I want to spare us the trite sayings, theological fundaments, and proverbial virtues and cut to something I think we can (and definitely should) grapple with in our practical lives.

Oh yeah this is one of a few shorter blogs I’ll be putting this month.

Thanks for not reading.