What Would You Do If You Stopped Waiting For It to Get Better?
Life may never get easier. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it
One thing that continues to amaze me as I get older is just how hard life is.
Make no mistake: I say this as an immensely privileged person. But despite that, it can feel that adulthood is just an endless game of whack-a-mole. As soon as you extinguish one crisis — a professional mess, a health scare, a relationship problem, financial woes—another one seems to pop up in its place. It’s like a rotating cast of challenges designed to keep you on your toes, until your toes become weak and brittle and you want to fall over.
This, I admit, is not a very hopeful way to view life. However, I’ve come round to the idea that life can’t be characterized by one feeling or set of experiences — good or bad. Instead, life is all the things, all at once. So when you’re in the shit—be it physical, emotional, financial, logistical—the task is not to wait for it to end and hope things get better so you can finally enjoy the easy part. There is no easy part. Instead, the task is to make sure that amidst all the hard stuff, you’re finding room for the good stuff too, whatever that may be.
Because when you begin to accept that life, generally speaking, is quite hard a lot of the…
