The Difficult

 

 

People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as is true for everything alive.

Rainer Maria Rilke

 

It has taken me a long while to glimpse the wisdom in accepting, engaging, and even seeking out difficulty and challenge in life.  For a long while, I longed for the easy believing that this might be possible if I could work hard enough, and with just enough luck everything, would just fall into place financially, socially, physically, emotionally.  Then I might no longer be so afraid, discontent, depressed. 

 

But around midlife if we are even only a tiny bit awake, we start to see that life does not unfold the way we hope it will no matter how good we are or hard working.  There are many losses, betrayals, illnesses, disasters that we and those we love will be asked to confront. Yoga gave me a glimpse of a way to find peace in the midst of all that was falling apart through the journey to the innerself.  But as this spiritual journey has deepened, I have also begun to see the treasures that difficulty, losses, dark times of loneliness and despair bring into our lives.  It is not as if we should not work for economic justice, help to those in need, work for the the end to war, but that when difficulty crosses our threshold that this too can renew and strengthen our faith, courage, and compassion. 

 

And if we were to try and lock ourselves away from every difficulty, our lives would get very small.  We would become more brittle, less vital, more afraid.  The Divinity or God that created us did not make us to be kept away in a box but has given us the chance to live our life to the fullest and this requires us to learn some hospitality to that which we fear.  Crossing that fear is how we learn to love, to give more, to live in the fullness of this miraculous aliveness.