Here’s the first of five elemental truths gathered by Richard Rohr from traditional initiation rites for males.  (I think the five stand for everyone, mind.)*

It’s an important message for a culture which hopes life will be easy.**   Significant and satisfying things seem to come to us through effort.^  (Easy can be a dead end and its outworkings may be the hardest thing of all to face.)

We have to let go of easy.

Seth Godin refers to speed and wow marketing, how we need to use the medium for something deep and meaningful:

‘What works to change mindsets, to
spread important ideas, and to create
an audience for work that matters.’

Speed and wow could describe many aspects of our life today, getting in the way of the discovery of our deepest gladness can meet the world’s deepest needs.

Life is hard, but …

We get to complete this sentence in a plethora of ways.  It can become a doorway.

There’s more to us than we know – personally and collectively – and we seem to thrive in the hardest places and times, producing meaningful work, adapting when things fail and go wrong, discovering, learning, and trying again.

I find myself intrigued by how integrity, wholeness, and perseverance are developed in people.  Daniel Coyle offers a glimpse of what’s happening behind the scenes of struggling with the hard when he writes, ‘The only way [improvement] happens is to build new connections in the brain -which involves reaching, failing, and, yes, looking stupid.’

It’s hard, but through hard, we are literally rewiring ourselves to live larger – more imaginative and creative, more amazed and grateful, more generous and enjoyable – lives.

(*I won’t give them all just yet.)
(**Although there is a hardness to life – sickness, natural and Human events, etc. – which are real for everyone, in the West we are insulated from many of the hard things of life like building our own home, growing our own food, making our own technology.)
(^I’ve just completed Albert Espinosa’s The Yellow World in which he encourages us to think and talk about our deaths.)