Carrying the Burdens of Life

Most people are trained to avoid the hard and the difficult. Most are inclined towards the comfortable, the easy and the basic.

This inclination is not all bad. It is more efficient, at least in the short term, to avoid the hard and the difficult. It preserves energy and minimizes risk to the person. Easy actions require lesser expenditure of resources; as resource-driven creatures, human instinctively act towards preserving and maximizing resource use.

However, the rate of our development has greatly surpassed our instincts. The comfort we now know is vastly different from the comfort once known by our ancestors. Coupled with relatively easier access to basic resources like food, this tendency to avoid the challenging has become problematic.

The point of such an instinct is to preserve energy and resources for other, more difficult and more important tasks. However, our current state of society has driven down the value of what is difficult and what is important. Through specialization of tasks, difficult has become extremely relative. While our ancestors may have connected the words difficult and important to the fact of simple survival, the modern human may connect those words with going to the gym, eating healthy or finishing that last pile of paperwork on one's desk.

This is, again, not to minimize or somehow be contemptuous of what we consider important. It's all a matter of relativity. The things we consider important and difficult are important and difficult - relatively speaking.

However, there is a more difficult mode of existence - that of trying to achieve one's personal ideal. This personal ideal is simply that which we long for, the greatest of our ambitions. Its achievement will not be easy. It will certainly not be comfortable; it is what all of our preserved energy seems to be for.

To achieve this ideal requires that one be willing to accept the burdens of life. It requires that a person expose himself to hardships, to risks and to things that can hurt him, physically, mentally, emotionally. However, it is this constant exposure to that which we are inclined to avoid that brings us closer to the ideal. Like a bodybuilder's weights, the resistance provided by these burdens makes us stronger by their cumulative application.

Therefore, while occasionally tending towards comfort and ease is not bad, it is the difficult and the uncomfortable that often leads to ever greater achievements.