Do It Anyway
It’s Hard. It Hurts. It’s an Uphill Battle — Do It Anyway.
Everything worthwhile in life comes with a cost and a fair amount of struggle. It starts with a choking gasp for air as you exit the birth canal and doesn’t end until you take that final gasp for air as you leave this earth behind. That’s not meant to bring anyone down. It’s a simple fact of life that should provide enough impetus to get us all off our derrières and focused on what we can see, feel and do in the fascinating world in which we live while we still have the time.
It Started Out to be Easy As a child, you probably didn’t think much about the effort it took to master the simple functions of living. You learned to crawl, walk, run, talk and use the toilet, not because it was easy — it wasn’t — but because those abilities were the foundation for everything else you wanted to do. They allowed you to become a civilized human being able to function in the world with other civilized human beings. Imagine your existence without those early accomplishments. Going to school as a child brought a new batch of challenges. Think about the struggles to read, understand math and learn about the universe outside your own little world through science and the arts. There was so much to learn and you were an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with the knowledge of the universe. Again, imagine your existence without the knowledge you gained.
Until Suddenly It Wasn’t (Easy) Somewhere along the way, life seemed to get a little harder. It became a struggle to form lasting relationships or to take on the challenges of a career, to raise a family or to stick with that much needed exercise program. Getting through the day from morning until evening became a Herculean task, success granted to the few who could persevere. How did life go from eagerly accepting the work needed to achieve a goal to anxiously avoiding most of those same challenges? Did the mountain get steeper? I don’t think so. I think what happens to so many of us is that we stop looking at ourselves as our major competitor and start looking at the outside world and comparing ourselves unfavorably to the competition out there. As a child, we wanted to take more steps than we took yesterday in order to get out there in the world more. We wanted to learn more words so we could communicate better to have our needs met. We wanted to learn to read because we were starting to see the world open up for us through books. We were still self-centered enough to see how we could benefit personally from each new accomplishment in life. We didn’t have to be better than anybody — we just had to be better than we ourselves were the day before. If we could do that, we were satisfied. Competition is a Natural Human Condition It’s ingrained in the human spirit to be competitive. That’s how the cavemen were able to secure the food and lodging needed to survive in their prehistoric world. They had to outrun, out-fight and out-maneuver every other living thing, animal or human, to stay alive. The old “survival of the fittest” concept is what kept the human race flourishing as long as it has. Don’t get me wrong, competition is a good thing. It pushes us to be better — sometimes. It can also push us into a corner of paralysis if we don’t understand who and what we are competing against. As a child, we grew increasingly better at whatever we were doing — because our competition was a younger, weaker, less skilled version of us. As an adult, we look at others as the benchmark we use to measure ourselves against. It’s pretty easy to find someone better than ourselves as we work on any goal. We may no longer surpass the competition and that can look a lot like failure if we’re not careful.
Challenge Yourself
It hurts. It’s hard. It’s an uphill battle. All of that is true. But it’s never going to change. None of us had a say when it came to setting up the rules of the game. Competitors come and competitors go — all of them except for one. At the end of the day, the only real competition you have is the one you started out in life with — YOU. Do it anyway. You’ll get better at whatever it is — better than you were yesterday — and that’s the only competition that really matters.
