I don’t do things because they are easy. I do them because I thought they were going to be easy.
I value ease a lot. I remember arguing with a friend about the role of a partner: I said it was to make your life easier, and she said it was to make your life better. I think our fundamental misunderstanding was on the word “easy”.
Life is not easy. It can be, for some beautiful moments. Longer perhaps, for the luckiest of us. But taken as a whole, when counting all the years you have to live, life is not easy. You know that. You’ve seen it. You’re preparing for it.
A crucial act of preparation is to make things easier. Have routines that make things predictable, offload responsibilities that you entrust people or machines with, develop healthy habits that serve you well, find the right mix of rarity and regularity that regales while relegating the rote and repetitive.
Doing this is easier said than done. It takes forethought and focus, patience and practice, tenacity, temerity, and time. It is not easy. It is hard. I don’t want to do hard things if I can help it. They don’t align with my nature. Usually, if something is hard, it is a sign that I’m doing something stupid, something incorrect, something wrong. When things are done right, they are easy, they flow, they cut like butter, they sing. Many things are that easy for me, and I enjoy them greatly. For those that are not, I must enjoy them even more, exponentially more, to bear the difficulty they entail. And if I do, the enjoyment makes them easier.
The more ease you can build in to your life, the more energy and attention and capacity you will have for the hard times when they inevitably come. It is easier to survive an illness, bear passing of loved ones, and endure through life changing periods, with people you love and trust by your side, than without.
Some hard things become easier when you think about the cost of not doing them. Is it harder to save money, to eat healthy, to move, to learn, to risk your heart; than it is to end up poor, ill, in pain, unable, unloved? If you look at your life holistically, the hard thing today is actually the easiest thing you can do.
Water follows the easiest path, and cuts continents in two. Fire follows the easiest path, and will stop at nothing. Lightning follows the easiest path, and carries more energy in a single flash than we can safely contain. The Earth follows the easiest path around the Sun, and has sprouted the lone miracle of life anywhere in the known Universe.
Do not dismiss easy. Listen to it, engage with it, tune your soul to it. Identify that which your body and mind and heart respond to with ease, and follow it to your destiny.