Everything you love was really hard to get. It’s why you love it so much. It cost you, so you protect it. If you lost it, it would crush you. If your wife is the girl of your dreams, you had to chase her. Your child sleeping upstairs right now? You remember how traumatic an event it was to bring him into this world. You saw what it cost your wife.
Aside from our children being our flesh and blood, we love them so much because every single aspect of their existence is hard on us. Its hard on our time, our money, our emotions, our patience. Their existence causes us great struggle, and gives our lives great meaning.
I recently came across a program called Heroes and Horses. They help combat veterans overcome crippling PTSD with a very simple method.
DO Really Hard Things. Their mission stopped me in my tracks.
“To start a new, universally-understood conversation around the necessity of struggle, challenge and perseverance as they relate to creating meaning in one's life
- without one, you cannot have the other.
The life and death importance of struggle manifests in life and death itself. Doctors are just now realizing the importance of natural birth vs a C section. They’ve found
the stress of going through the birth canal is paramount for a strong immune system. From the very first moments of life, we are demanded to struggle to become strong.
For an animal to live it must take the life of another. I don’t know when the last time you had to take the will to live from a creature for your next meal, but it’s not an easy
and fast food experience. A frictionless experience is a recipe for a meaningless life. To obtain everything and value nothing. Struggle free living creates an expectation
that the things I get and experience should be easy to come by. If it’s hard there must be something wrong, with me or them, something must be wrong.
You are not bored and sad because you do not have enough, or you do not have your dream job. You are bored and sad because it wasnt hard enough to get.
There’s no value attached to excessive ownership. Your sad because your job doesnt challenge you to be the best version of yourself. We were told more property
meant more happiness. That was never true. The process to get it was where contentment came.
When we skip to the front of the line, there’s no worth to weigh against the wait. No wait, no meaning. No meaning, no happiness.
Check in, ask yourself what you are sidestepping? What are you trying to avoid? There is struggle there. There is purpose to be found. The struggle is the tie that
binds living creatures and meaning together. It is the essential balance to save us from ourselves. Make no mistake, to engage in struggle is to wage war on our lesser selves. No war is more violent than World WAR ME. But like Napolean said, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” What we do with struggle , writes the story you
believe about yourself.