Forget median family household incomes and life expectancies around the world. Forget for a moment that billions of people live without food or shelter security. For those of us fortunate enough to be able to have the time, money, and ability to read this our lives are tough as well. We do not need to compare “our toughness” with the difficulty of others. That is a trap. If we start feeling guilty about our privilege in being able to have the luxury of pleasure reading we help no one. There is always someone better off and someone worse off. There is always more that each of us could do to alleviate the suffering of others. That is not at hand. For now, we are going to “selfishly” focus on just our own little lives. For if we do not acknowledge that our own lives are at least sometimes difficult we are destined to live less happily and less productively and spread less joy to those around us. There is no glory in living paralyzed.
There is no manual for life. There is no guarantee that the DNA that you were given is fully functional. There is equally no guarantee that the rearing received from caretakers prepared you properly for the numerous challenges that lie ahead. You might have a difficult boss or neighbor that cannot or will not control their barking dog. You may have rightly or wrongly been passed over for the promotion that would have allowed you to “finally make ends meet”. A satellite might fall from the sky through your recently re-roofed home crashing through the beautiful dining table that you built by hand (but thankfully not injuring anyone!). A really big earthquake will hit the Pacific coast at some point.
And after going through a short list of the possible threats to our life and liberty we are left with the greatest threat of all….our own little monkey brains. What a great advance for Earth….human reasoning and logic. Our brains are the most complicated thing that we know of in all of existence (especially that in the skull of a teenage daughter!) Our little monkey brains can create symphonies and quantum theories of gravity. They can also create anxiety and unrealistic expectations of how life is to be lived. When they do this they are helping no one.
Humans today are all too often receiving improper sleep, improper nutrition, and improper down-time. We are plugged-in and connected in a lonely dystopian malaise. Lots of people don’t take vacations. Roughly half the country is living paycheck to paycheck….and many more are a single medical diagnosis away from being homeless. The icebergs are melting. Greenhouse gases are building up as the rainforests are being clear-cut. Ebola, drug-resistant tuberculosis, zika, global computer malware attacks, droughts and floods, famines and genocides, somedays I think we all deserve gold-stickers just for getting out of bed. It is hard. And if you are living below the poverty limit, or are homeless, or battling a disease, or recently lost a loved one, or if you fall into any of hundreds of other challenging categories your life is really hard. And…and….this is all knowing that there are billions of people with harder lives than we have.
But, that is a dangerous road to go down. And there is no need to venture down that thought path as long as we are being responsible, doing our best to live good lives, raise good kids, volunteer our time and treasure, and be compassionate, without judging the sentient beings around us. You and I could be doing more. We could also be doing less. But if we do not realize that life really is tough we are destined to just be global deadweight. We can accomplish so much more if we are healthy. And we cannot be healthy if we are beating ourselves up for finding life so tough….it is. There is a time to challenge ourselves, and there is a time to fortify ourselves. Sometimes we need to take on more weight in our packs, and at other times we need to transfer some of that to a friend. When we find life really getting challenging there is tremendous power in acknowledging that it really is difficult. It might just give us the strength to help ourselves, thereby putting us in the position to be able to help others.
