Hardship
I sometimes think about hardship. We so often find ourselves trying to avoid it. When I was a young college student, my pastor once asked me what I wanted out of my life. My trite and well-thought out response? “Comfort.”
I think that can get easily lost, so allow me to consolidate it into an easier framework.
From a young age, I’ve always been concerned about being of ‘worth.’
There’s a particular book by Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals, that spoke to me in a particular poignant way.
It was about a young Ork named Nutt. His entire life was determined by how much ‘worth’ he was to the people around him. He was constantly working, learning and pleasing the people around him.
The conclusion of the book had two plot points that tied up with him discovering that the worth was in him all along. He didn’t need to determine it from the outside factors.
So, for me, I derived a lot of my younger goals through that. I wanted to know if I was of worth. To be comfortable knowing that.
I guess now that I’m getting older, I’m starting to realize what it means to avoid this idea of comfort. To intentionally seek out hardship or to be more accommodating to those who are going through circumstances that are so much more difficult than the ours.
It’s a paradigm shift in perspective. There are so many personal finance blogs that proselytize the wonders of a financially independent lifestyle. The wonders of wealth. The desire to be set. Wealth promises so much.
I don’t really know if that’s true.
So here’s the narrative that I think I need to weave. The four page memo and not that 10 slide presentation.
It’s about the act of writing, not the act of prevaricating.
First. That comfort is a very tempting end-state.
Second. That being worthy of comfort is a difficult place to reach.
Third. That growth is stymied by too much comfort.
Fourth. That a desire to grow must come from within.
Last. That I still seek comfort. However, when I am in hardship, I should seek to grow from it.
So let’s string together this diatribe in a coherent manner.
Terry would often find himself in interesting situations. You see, he was an award winning author. A knight even. Millions of children would gleefully open the pages of his next work of fiction, gladly whiling away hours of their days as they gallivanted across the lands of Ankh Morpork with his delightful cast of companions.
However, Terry found himself in a conundrum here. He had a particularly, painful form of Alzheimer’s. One where his mind would slowly decay over time. He was on a deadline here. A final sentence.
So he wrote. and he wrote. and he wrote.
I think that the life of Terry Pratchett is a very good picture of a gleeful man who just wanted to share with the world what he had joy in. There is little to no doubt that he has made my life better, despite the fact that his life was not particularly joyful.
We find ourselves trying to reach comfort, believing that it’s this beautiful end-state. One where we can reach joy and happiness. We work hard to reach it. There’s a world that promises us that our lives will be better when we arrive.
So we work. At least, I worked to achieve it. We would find angles and work them. Create plans, squirrel away money and grow our connections until we start amassing more and more of the currency that guarantees us comfort. It’s not an easy path. I remember times when I was rejoice so much as I found myself with an IT job. Or I would be distraught with sorrow as I failed classes that I was promised would grant me the comfort that I so desperately sought.
To be frank, I’m at this point where I’m comfortable. By no means am I a millionaire or that I’ve reached the end of my path.
However, I think that I’m comfortable. It’s at this comfortable crux that I think that I need to pivot.
You see, I think that growth is stymied by too much comfort. That a desire to grow is often incentivised by the external factors of money or reputation. However, once you’ve reached certain points, the external factors either don’t motivate anymore or push me into being a person that I very much would not like to be.
So here’s my conclusion. That I should still seek comfort. That when I’m in a position where I can learn to relax, I can be happy. However, when I am in a place of hardship, I should seek to write. That I should be able to grow when I’m in a difficult place, irregardless of what the end goal is. Despair shouldn’t be my immediate conclusion. I should instead seek to work against my deadline. That I can show the world who I am, regardless of what the world wants to promise me.
So that’s my mantra. That’s my personal diatribe.
To be like Terry and share joy the way that the world wants me to.