“A life of ease is not the pathway to growth and happiness. On the contrary, a life of ease is how you get stuck and confused in life.” […] But if you look closely at joyful people, you notice that very often the people who have the most incandescent souls have taken on the heaviest burdens.**
(Ben Hardy and David Brooks)

Every weekday morning I have my constitutional walk. It gets me out of the house when I would otherwise be working inside all day. Because it’s the same walk each time, it makes things easier for getting out for exercise and fresh air – no umming and ahing. The changing scenery is a delight, no two days are alike, but I wouldn’t want this to be the only path I ever walk.

I have found that the more I understand about what I must do with my life, the more difficult the path becomes.

You would think it would be the other way around, but finding my way brings me to many crossroads and forks. A pathway equivalent of the Ship of Theseus, through the choices I have made it is now quite a different path than the one I first set out on, although it looks like one.

When I look more closely, I see these crossroads and forks are really possibilities into richness, of creativity, community and commission – as in, purpose.

There has always been the easier option, which may be to continue on the way I have been travelling awhile, or even to select something easier than this, but there are often multiple better ways, too.

A more difficult path tends to do that, multiplying possibility, reflecting the complexity life is.

(*Ben Hardy and David Brooks from Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)