Living Life: making it easy

I know that we all appreciate life. Despite all of the complaining we do, we really do enjoy life. After all, what is the alternative? Rather than debate the possibilities of the afterlife, I’d rather keep it simple. Let’s keep it as simple as this: we have a simple decision to make each day. Every day, with everything we do we have to make one decision. That decision is either to get up in the morning and live, or to stay in bed and hide. No matter what else you run into during the day, you’ve already made the decision to get up and live, so why start worrying now?

I was talking to a friend one day after a long day. He had been working very long hours and felt like he wasn’t going to be able to make it to our hockey game that evening. I had experienced the same thing during grueling weeks myself, so I understood where he was coming from. The advice I gave him was directly from a coach that said it to me.

The story of how I discovered the one simple decision:

One day, during hockey practice I was feeling tired. We had a set number of repetitions to get through on a particular drill. We would not be getting done until we had done the drill ten times. The number was ten, period, not eight, not nine, but exactly ten. I was so exhausted that I had to take a knee between one drill and the next. When I did this, my coach came over and said: “you know, you have to do this anyway. “ “I know”, I said with a heavy sigh, “but I am so tired!” When he heard this, my coach asked me a question that seemed out of place for the rink. He said, “Have you ever been bored in class?” I answered with a an emphatic “Yes, of course I’ve been bored in class!” “Well, did the time go any faster when you started to get antsy?” “No”, I answered after thinking about it for a second. “Ok, did you feel good when you got done?” “Yes, I waited so long to get done.” “Did you really?” He asked. “Hmmm, yeah?” I answered as he cracked a smile. His next question was what got me thinking. “Did you feel good, or did you just feel like you were no longer fighting against something?” “Just because you felt antsy and bored during class, doesn’t mean you felt GOOD when class ended. It just means you don’t feel AS antsy or bored.”

What I learned from that conversation was that no matter how much I disliked the end of practice or the end of class or anything else in life, I had a decision to make. That decision is simple. In fact, it is even simpler than I thought it was. The decision is: Do I want to do this the easy way, or do I want to do it the hard way? It is that simple. As you live your life, you can choose to do it the easy way or to do it the hard way.

Now when I say easy or hard, I don’t mean to take the easy way out and never push yourself. That is a different kind of easy. The easy I’m talking about is the state of mind we had when we were kids. Remember when it was easy to enjoy everything? Remember when you smiled all day and laughed at everything that happened without waiting to see if it was an appropriate situation to laugh at?

Somewhere along the line it becomes easier to make life hard. It becomes natural to find all of the things we don’t like about something and focus on them. We focus on them to the point that we are unable to see any good in a situation because we are too busy thinking about everything we don’t like. We will even spend time complaining about good things in our lives. I’m not perfect. I complain. I find things that are good to be a “hassle” or a “burden” just like everyone else. But I noticed something that many of us are doing without thinking about it. We are making life very difficult for ourselves. When given the decision to make life easy or make life hard, we are choosing to make it hard. I don’t know why this is and I don’t even know that I have the answer. What I do know is that we have the power to make a decision. We can decide to make life easier, if we really want to. I believe that when you are truly living your life, you make it easier on yourself and everyone around you.

Live life, enjoy it and make it easy.