Life Is Hard

Have you ever seen the bumper sticker that says, "Life is hard - and then you die"?  I laughed the first time I saw it.  Then I wondered why I was laughing.  It must have been the element of surprise.  There was one of the great truths of life staring me in the face from the rear end of someone else's car.  It was something I would have expected to read in a book written by one of the ancient philosophers.

In fact, it is one of the ancient philosophers who is usually credited with saying it first.  About 2,500 years ago,  Buddha wrote what became known as the Four Noble Truths.  The first one was "Life is suffering."  He may have been the first to write it, but I suspect that many people had it figured out a long time before he came along.  It would be hard to believe that the world's earliest inhabitants had it any easier.  Life is hard.  It always has been, and it always will be.

The first three words in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's highly acclaimed book The Road Less Traveled are "Life is difficult."  Peck calls this one of the greatest truths because once we understand and accept it, we can live more effectively.  Instead of moaning about our problems, we can look for ways to solve them.  One of the main differences between those who succeed and those who fail can be found in how they approach life's difficulties.  Failures try either to avoid their problems or to work around them.  Successful people accept them and work through them, even when it includes some suffering.  It's this process of meeting our problems head-on and looking for solutions that give life meaning.

The problem with too many people, regardless of age, is that they either don't understand or don't accept the fact that life involves a certain amount of hardship.  They fight against it instead of adjusting to it.  They grumble and complain, both to themselves and others, about the magnitude of their problems.  They talk as if their difficulties are unique, and seem to feel that life is easier for everyone else.  Complaining doesn't make problems go away.  It only makes them worse, because it has a magnifying effect. Complaining is an attempt to unload our problems on others, a way of refusing to accept them as necessary conditions of life.

Not long ago I ran into a former student who's now in his twenties.  After filling me in on what he had been doing, he added, "I'm glad I had you as a teacher."  Naturally, I was flattered, but I was also curious.  I always wonder what my students remember some years after being in one of my classes.  So I asked why.  He said, with a knowing smile on his face, "Because life is hard."  He said that that simple truth had helped him work through some rough spots in his life since finishing high school.  Then he reminded me of the time when he first heard it.

When he was a freshman in one of my World Studies classes, I had given a particularly challenging assignment.  I warned the kids in advance that I was going to make them do two things teachers weren't supposed to make their students do:  think and work.  After a few good-natured groans, they started in.  About halfway through, someone said, "This hard."  I responded the way always do:  "Life is hard."  We then proceeded to have a wonderful discussion about philosophy, life, work, pain, joy, and success.  Now, years later, this former student probably doesn't know the capital of Malaysia, but he does know that life is hard.  More importantly, he has accepted it.

Once we accept the fact that life is hard, we begin to grow.  We begin to understand that every problem is also an opportunity.  It is then that we dig down and discover what we're made of.  We begin to accept the challenges of life.  Instead of letting our hardships defeat us, we welcome them as a test of character.  We use them as a means of rising to the occasion.

At the same time, we need to understand that society bombards us daily with messages that are quite the opposite.  To begin with, technology has provided us with push-button living.  We can open the garage door, cook dinner, wash the dishes, record our favorite TV program, and pay our bills by simply pushing the right buttons.  In addition, we're told over and over that there's a quick and easy way to do just about everything.  Within just the past few days, I've read or heard that you can lose a hundred pounds, learn to speak a foreign language fluently, become a hot new radio personality, get a contractor's license, and make a million dollars in real estate.  You can do all of these in a matter of days, and with little or no effort.  And pigs can fly.

Those ads are all around us because the people in advertising and marketing have a good understanding of human behavior.  They know that most people don't accept life as hard and will continue to look for a quick and easy way instead.  In the previous chapter, I said that successful people accept life as it is.  Part of that is understanding that things worth achieving don't come quickly or easily.  They come with a price.  They come as the result of time, effort, sacrifice, and pain.  Because life is hard.

And It's Not Always Fair

In 1981, Harold Kushner, describing himself as being "hurt by life", wrote a book for others who have been hurt yet deserved something better - that is, if life was always fair.  The book is called When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  It became one of the most widely read books of the 1980s.  It's a classic because it deals with one of our oldest and most universal questions:  "Why?" Or better yet, "Why me?"  Kushner had every reason to ask the question.  His son, Aaron, was diagnosed at age three as having progeria - rapid aging disease.  He suffered physically, his family suffered emotionally,  and he died at fourteen.  He and his family both deserved better.

Unfortunately, life isn't always fair.  It's probably the most painful truth we have to learn and the hardest to accept.  Bad things do happen to good people - sometimes to others, sometimes to us.  And it seems all too often that they happen when least deserved.  In addition, we see good things happen to people who don't deserver that, either. As it says in the Bible, the sun rises upon evil men as well as good, and it rains upon the honest and dishonest alike.  It's no wonder we hear ourselves saying, "It isn't fair."  Sometimes it's hard to make sense out of the world.

I don't want to imply for a second that when tragedy strikes we're supposed to say, "Well, that's the way the cookie crumbles," and then go merrily on with our lives.  None of us can do that.  At the other extreme, we can't wish pain out of existence, either.  What we can do is learn to handle it more effectively.  As my friend Tim Hansel says in his wonderful book You Gotta Keep Dancin', "Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional." We can avoid that misery by developing constructive ways of facing up to the pain life deals us.  We can resolve that we won't let it destroy us, that we will accept it as a reality of life and even grow from it. 

Benjamin Franklin wrote, "Those things that hurt, instruct."  Maybe that's why it's often said that some of life's most painful lessons are also the most valuable.  The most important thing we can do when we're hurting, whether it's physical or emotional hurt, is to find some meaning in it.  Pain does teach us something, but we have to be willing to learn from it.  When we do, we emerge as both wiser and stronger.  Our real success in life will be largely determined by how well we deal with adversity: whether we run from it or face up to it, whether we shrink or grow from it, whether we surrender to it or triumph over it.

We live in an imperfect world with other imperfect people.  No one can promise us lives free from pain or disappointment.  Nor can anyone promise us safety or total control.  But we're not alone.  Every living person shares the same predicament.  Every living person encounters unfairness and suffers the hurt and loss which come with it.  It's not a question of whether they experience these things, but how they experience them.   The people who succeed in life don't escape unfairness.  They just learn to accept it and manage it more constructively.

Maybe that's why so many people have Reinhold Niebuhr's famous Serenity Prayer prominently displayed in their homes and offices:

God grant me ...

the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Everyday Courage

What we become depends not on conditions but on decisions.  Some people are conditioned and determined by outward circumstances.  They're on top when things are going good.  They crumble when things go bad.  They seem to let the stars, the fates, the gods, the winds, or other things beyond their control determine their lives.  What they don't seem to understand is that when we're faced with miserable conditions, we're also faced with a decision:  whether to give in to them or stand up to them.

Standing up to some of the harsh realities of life requires courage.  Winston Churchill viewed courage as a starting place.  He said, "Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all the others."  He wasn't referring just to courage on a grand scale - that associated with famous people and major events - but everyday courage.  No one is born with it, nor does it require any exceptional characteristics.  More than anything else, courage is a decision.  It's a decision to dig down and search our character, to find a source of strength when life frustrates us.  It's the decision we have to make if we want to become fully human.

Shortly before he died, the great theologian and author of The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich, was asked to discuss the central theme of his book and to explain the meaning of everyday courage.  Tillich said that real courage is saying yes to life in spite of all the hardship and pain which are part of human existence.  He said it takes courage on a daily basis to find something ultimately positive and meaningful about both life and ourselves.  When we can do that, he said, we not only accept life more fully but begin to live it more fully.  "Loving life is perhaps the highest form of the courage to be."

Life is hard ... and it's not always fair.  But that doesn't mean it can't be good, rewarding, and enjoyable.  There are still a lot of reasons to say yes to it.

Hal Urban

A good book is the best friends, the same today and forever.

Martin Tupper