Thursday 20 November 2014

Life is hard

Everybody wants to be a bit Pharrell Williams. We all want some happy in lives. We all want that perfect little life. We want that fantastic job that we always enjoy. We want to be with Mrs. Right or Mr Perfect. If we have kids we want them to be the sort of kids that other people praise because they are such good role models. We want to have the kind of friends that stick by us come rain or shine. We want to be able to have all the material things life has to offer and just have all our problems disappear.

Everybody wishes for there ideal life. Of course one persons view of a good life may be completely different for somebody else. For one person a good life may just mean having three meals a day and a roof over their head. For another it may be living in a huge mansion and having a few million in the bank. Whatever you definition of it, there is one thing that you probably have in common with everyone else. You want that 'good life' to be stress free. You want a life where you don't have to work too hard to achieve it. 

Unfortunately of course, that's what's probably stopping you from having that great life. The thought of all that hard work, all that strife and planning, overcoming hurdles and having to fight for things is enough to make a lot of people give up before they even start. It can seem like too much for some, and for quite a few it just doesn’t seem to be worth it. It’s like being completely drained of energy before being asked to run a marathon. The fear of just getting to the starting line tires you out so much mentally you just decide not to go for it at all. It’s just too hard!

But guess what – life IS hard, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Of course, once we know that life is hard and actually accept it – then life starts to get a little easier. It's impossible to get anything in life without some degree of effort. (Unless you win the Lottery of course, and we all know the odds of that one)

Life is hard – people aren't always going to be nice or react the way you want them to. Your job will have challenges that you didn't foresee and clients may not be the easiest people to understand. Your kids won’t always be the ideal you want them to be. Your home may not be the ideal place you have in your mind. Your better other won't always be as perfect as you hope they are, and indeed you may not the perfect specimen that you once thought you were either.

I'm not saying we don’t deserve a break or not justified in hoping that we deserve more than what we've got from life and the world to this point. I mean we've all worked very hard and done all that we could in our lives to try and make them a bit better. But things don’t alway work out as well as we plan or hope. Things are just a bit more rubbish than we hoped they would be.

That’s quite normal I'm afraid, it's one of the things that being human is all about. To coin a business speak saying, it's all about managing our expectations upstream. Life is hard, so we might as well accept it.
Once you do, you WILL feel better about your circumstances. You won’t think of your situation as anything but what is normal for all of us. Then it just become a part of life. You will no longer beat yourself up about how bad things are or how you are not doing so well in one area or another. You will realise that you are only a mere mortal like the rest of us! Guess what – you make mistakes just like everybody else. We're not perfect, just like everyone else.

Accepting that life is hard though doesn't mean that you have to accept every circumstance and just go with the flow though. You see, there is another side to this coin. Yes, one side of the coin is inscribed with “life is hard”, but if you turn that coin over you will find in very small writing it says:
“You can make it better”

Accepting that life is hard comes with accepting that you have the responsibility to make it better. You see, the only person you have any control over in your life is you. You cannot change other people. But no matter what situation is or how bad it may be, you do have a choice. No matter what you think you can or cannot do, you still a choice.

Now it may not alway be an easy choice, by any means. It may push you way out of your comfort zone. It may even mean that your life may get even harder than it already is for a while. But it is still a choice.

A lot of times you will actually find that the choices are not as hard as you thought they were. You may just have shut off your mind from seeing those choices and possibilities because you thought you had no choice. Once we become open to the idea that we are responsible for our lives and that we do have choices, we start find that we are no longer stuck just because life is hard.

Do look after yourselves and each other.

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