struggle

I’m starting to think our minds all have a kind of split personality disorder. On the one hand, we’d like to spend our lives sipping umbrella-topped drinks on a beach chair in Cabo. On the other, our minds crave challenge, struggle, growth. So we go around asking ourselves, “Why does life have to be so hard?” When challenges happen, we think that if we could just get through this one, we’d go ahead and buy our plane tickets and order our drinks and that’d be it. But you know that when this challenge is resolved, another one will take its place. You also know what would happen if you did somehow get a vacation of indefinite length. You’d love it for a week. Maybe two weeks. You’d lie on the beach and soak it up for a while. And then you’d start looking for something to do, something to interest you, some trouble to get into.

So my question is not, “Why is life so hard?” but “Why do we want it to be?” Why can’t we just leave it at beach chairs and drinks and soak up leisure forever?

I suggest it has to do with value. Money is great and all, but we all know that the amount of money spent on something doesn’t assure its value. Somehow the psychological value of anything for us is the struggle associated with its attainment. A painted room, as you stand in the doorway covered in paint, with a sore back and dripping roller. A college degree earned with a baby on one hip. The sweaty, sleeping children that have run you ragged all day. You love these things, at least in part, because you’ve fought for them.

Thomas Paine’s old quote bears taking out and dusting off here:

“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”

So when people say nothing is easy, that’s not strictly true. Lots of things are easy, they just don’t mean much to us. We have some innate desire to subdue the ground, wrench from its reluctant arms our living, stand on our feet and survey the results of our labor and say, “I have done this.” What it boils down to is, whether we know it or not, at the end of our journey we want to be the kind of people that all that ground-wrenching will create, and not the kind the umbrella drinks will. And that isn’t going to be easy.

It has to be hard because our brains thrive on challenge. Our minds and souls crave growth. Fine. So why, when there are so very many of us who’ve lived and are living, do we have to do so much of it alone? Why can’t I struggle for both of us, and give you the results? Why do parents have to watch their children make hard decisions, sometimes choosing what they wouldn’t, and know they have to do it alone? Why do friends have to see each other suffer through an experience they’ve had themselves, and can only offer lame platitudes like, “This will pass” or “I know what you’re going through”?

In the Prince, Machiavelli talks about David, who went to fight Goliath for king Saul. Saul gave David his armor, but it didn’t fit. It would have been a liability for David, who had never used armor at all in his work as a shepherd. So when the crisis came, when David had to go out to face this giant, he had to go with only the tools he’d learned to use. He had to go with what he had. And he triumphed without the armor everyone else thought so necessary, because it wasn’t his.

So the struggle is necessary. The struggle is supremely important. And, like it or not, struggling and learning alone is important. I used to think there was such desperation in the last lines of Emma Wheeler Wilcox’s poem "Solitude":

“There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.”

But I think now that it’s simply a statement of facts. We have to do so many of the difficult things alone if we want the outcome to be ours.

But I also think there may be a couple of tiny little ways we can beat the system. I’m struggling. You’re struggling. We can’t struggle together, but we can realize that we’re each doing it and give each other the space, support, and respect that growth in progress requires. If we understand what’s going on here, we can meet our difficulties with welcome and hope for what they can teach us, instead of fear for the temporary damage they’ll do. Let’s stand with William Ernest Henley and say:

“In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

When this whole big lesson called life is over and we’re weighed in the balance, I think I’d like to be the kind of person who’s dealt well with the challenges. Although the beach chair in Cabo would be fun, I don’t think it will count for much. So let the challenges come. You and I are ready. When it’s all done, we’ll certainly be bloody, but don’t let’s bow.