The beautiful struggle
We all want an easier life. We want a smooth path. A bright future. We look down the road and say, tomorrow will be a better day than today. We say this even when yesterday proved us wrong.
Where does the easy life come from? What must we do to achieve this life of luxury? Is it only the money or is there a whole range of demands that we make on what constitutes a good experience?
When people are talking about an easy future, I enquire about their past and how they got to where they are today, what roads they took. Without fail, it was a hard path. A treacherous path filled with trials and failures where circumstance and society did all it could to get in the way.
They speak how they had to fight, hack the jungle with a machete to clear a way for themselves to squeeze through into a clearing, only to come face to face with a hungry tiger. Challenge after challenge, but they overcame it all and survived, here they are.
They made it this far despite life doing all it could to stop them. And no matter what their current life circumstances, good or bad, they are alive and still fighting. We seem to all see ourselves as some kind of flawed hero who must face the tests of life to prove their value.
No one sees themselves as the enemy the bully, the insensitive, the lazy. Everything we do is selfless, truthful and justified and the negatives within us are out of our control and forced upon us by an unfair world. A terrible parent, a cheating lover, a bad neighbourhood.
When we recount our tales, we see ourselves as the protagonist, the leading role that the audience should empathize with and support. It is not my fault I am where I am, it was all the things that got in my way. This is the beautiful lie.
But, in every lie, their is truth. And it is true we are shaped by our experience but, the way we choose to manage our experience of it matters. How we see the world and how we see our interactions within it are very important to what we actually do.
When people talk of their past I can see whether they are breaking under experience or becoming stronger because of it. The callused hands of an experienced fighter are apparent when people speak, and apparent when they look forward. People want an easy path but that is not where they have learned.
Those that look forward to a smooth ride look for an illusion that those who have experienced are not fooled by. Experience tells that growth takes pressure, the seed must sprout, push through the soil and reach for the sun. But, it will never reach its height. It will enter into competition, it will battle storms and face strong winds, fire will threaten its very existence.
This is life. Nothing is certain in the future from our limited view, no matter our desires and expectations. Life is a struggle we all must face and it is in this uncertainty where we have the chance to grow and learn, add value to the world and actually be the heroes we envisage ourselves to be. We are made for this, evolution has created us for this purpose.
To adapt to the environment, to not turn away from the problems that plague us but find solution. Life itself is indifferent to what we do, how we act as it will go on, live well past any of us as an individual and well past us as a species.
It is you, me and we that give the world meaning, that help or harm, that look to gain by pushing down or linking arms to lift each other up. The struggles can never end for if they do, if we all live the easy future we desire, we stop growing, stop evolving, stop moving. We die as an individual, community and species.
Beauty isn't found in the easy, it is found in the overcoming, the blood, sweat and tears that push through when all hope is lost. We have all faced these moments, they are the moments that define us, mold us. They are the moments that create us and the ones that become our story. It is here that beauty lies, here in the beautiful struggle.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
So true, when people are successful and leading the so called easy life, they always have a story of struggle and hardships overcome to get them to where they are. If they are unhappy in life they always have someone other than themselves to blame. Life itself caused them to fail.
Obviously this is not true of absolutely everybody, but most.
I am very aware that my life is where it is based on the choices I've made and the circumstances that then arose from those choices.
Had I made different choices in the past I would obviously not be where I am today, but that does not mean I would be in a better place living the easy life. You look back on decisions and choices and think "If I hadn't done that" but you can never really know.
Great post!
Yes, this 'never really know' is a quite interesting concept as we can't process what never happened, just speculate and it will of course likely suffer from the grass is always greener problem.
The hard part is the realisation that despite all of the problems we face we have no control over, the responsibility is still ours to process.
Today happens to be filled with breakthroughs. The Steemit community and individuals within it are joining together and reaching for new heights. It seems to be a good time to grow which is a time of beautiful struggles.
Hopefully your understanding of smart tokens is now better than mine so I can ask advice. :)
The things we want most, are on the other side of the "hard" path.
I heard this somewhere, unfortunately I can't remember the person who said this. However, his saying has been true for me.
Not a bad post right here. There’s a group, no several groups of individuals here in Australia that seek to attain their brighter future by the following method: Hold out a figurative silver platter and wait for their bright future to fall on it. I’m not sure how it ends up for them but am pretty sure bright futures are gained in more proactive ways generally.
Still, some of them seem to be doing quite well for themselves.
I think the some that are doing well are over-represented in memory and the media and the majority that are not is largely hidden. It is like reading the biography of a superstar CEO that gives the secrets to success. No one reads the books of the 10,000 that failed with the same skill set because those books haven't been written, and if they were, who wants to read about failures.
¡Holy Cow! wadda coincidence my dear friend @tarazkp. Today, we definitely are hovering onto some kind of the same thematic cloud of synchronicity.
This post of yours is actually an extraordinary thoughtful jewel of rationality worth to be consumed and digested from all angles.
Therefore, I would like to invite you to also read my little version of a "post", portraying barely a tiny parcel of the same sensitivity that you've eloquently expressed here today with this great post. But then, as everyone would expect.. obviously, seen from the extremely odd, plain unusual and remarkably surreal perspectives of my own multimedia viewpoints. And of course, expressed by my alien style poetry narrated through my always extravagant & cryptic prose. }:)
¡Upvoted & Resteemed!
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This is comprehensive philosophy and helpful post @tarazkp