“Don’t avoid difficulty.  To avoid difficulty would mean complete retreat from life. It would mean hiding in ignorance.  Worse, this would make you dreadfully vulnerable to crisis if it did ever find you.  Instead, we must welcome hazard.  Rejoice in the unexpected and turn failure into strength by deciding to own it,” Marcus Aurelius.  We can’t avoid hard things.  It took me a long time to accept that.  I wasn’t looking for ease solely for myself.  I was always confused how there wasn’t a level playing field for all of us.  Like, no matter the track we are on, there needed to be an answer so why didn’t it always play out that way?  Why wasn’t there a simple answer for everything? If the entire world is a possibility and we are meant to dance in that, then why do we not have the opportunity for it to be easy?  I’m not an advocate for eliminating free will, but if there IS a right way, a way that works for all, then why don’t we eliminate all the other unnecessary crap? Why is there this hands off approach to life?  If there are no random events, then why isn’t there some kind of manual to get through?  What I’ve come to understand is that there may be a best course, but sometimes the lessons we need to learn aren’t on the best course.  Sometimes the lessons we need to learn involve humility and understanding rather than proving we are right or that we can get whatever we want.  Achieving those goals doesn’t come free—but it doesn’t have to come at a hefty price either.  We have to find the middle.

The middle sometimes looks like we are walking a fine line where we may fall to either side at any time.  That may be true.  What I’ve learned is that the middle sometimes means that the answer is something we have to work for, there are lessons we didn’t anticipate, understanding we don’t understand it all, and it means doing the work—even the work we don’t think we want to.  I have my frustrations with the difficulty we impart on our own lives, not by the work we have to do, but by the rules we create to prove our worth to some inconsequential standard that we also created.  The truth is that there is hard work to do and the path isn’t always clear.  But it is also true that we cause a great deal of our own issues with overthinking, ego, and avoidance.  Life isn’t about enduring OR avoiding—it’s about living and that includes the spectrum of experience just AS IT IS.  Not how we see it or what we think about it—but what it ACTUALLY IS.  If things don’t go how they were meant to, use it as a stone to bring us closer to how we want it to be.  Closer to what we need to learn, and then we take that experience and create an entirely new way of being aligned with who we are and what our purpose is.  We just have to be willing to embrace it. 

Life doesn’t happen to us.  It happens as we see it from the foundation of our beliefs and the lessons we’re learning to incorporate from those experiences.  How well do we pivot?  How well do we adapt?  How well do we learn to shed what doesn’t work and move forward?  How long to we hold onto what has tried to hurt us in hopes the edges will dull?  It’s all a choice and so too is deciding what is too hard and what we are willing to do—and what we aren’t.   A willingness to face what comes our way and a chance to undertake to do the work joyfully makes all the difference in the world.  What we plant we reap so if we put out seeds of anger, fear, and discord, that is what we will receive.  If we do the work with hope and intention and gratitude, we will more easily navigate through any challenge that may come our way. Life throws us curve balls for sure but the key is how we rally.  We can spend a whole lot of time finding ways to avoid what the world throws at us only to find out that it wasn’t as painful as we thought and then wishing we had done the work sooner.  We can’t avoid life otherwise it will be a life half-lived.  It’s better to learn to face the task head on rather than in hind site.  Be open and willing to trust that we are more than capable to handle whatever comes our way—it’s our journey, every part of it, good bad or otherwise.