The lap of luxury

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 easy, pleasant, enjoyable?

When people are talking about an easy future, I inquire about their past and how they got to where they are today, which roads they took. Without fail, it was a hard path. A treacherous path filled with trials and failures where circumstance and society did all they 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 find they are now face to face with a hungry tiger. Challenge after challenge. But they overcame it all and survived.

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 our 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 neighborhood.

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 a grain of truth. And it is true we are shaped by our experience but, the way we choose to manage our personal 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. Perspective matters.

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 they speak, and apparent when they look forward. People want an easy path but that is not where they have learned their skills.

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, must push through the soil and reach for the sun. But, it will never reach its full height. It will enter into competition, it will battle storms and face strong winds and 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 look for solutions to the problems we face and not turn away. Life itself is indifferent to what we do and 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, stop growing, stop evolving, stop moving. We die. As an individual, community and eventually a species.

Beauty isn't found in the easy, it is found in the overcoming, the drive, 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 Steem original ]