Hard Work is Easy
My family teases me because I nearly gag when the Snow Patrol song Chasing Cars comes on the radio. If I lay here... If I just lay here.... "No. My God, get off your ass, a thousand times no."
It is true, I have an affinity to hard work.
It is an easy love affair:
Hard work is logical. The presumed benefit of hard work is easy to understand and needs little effort to illustrate. I can explain it using a compact narrative along the lines of one of Aesop's Fables. I can view it as a simple equation: Challenge + Hard Work = Triumph. A few score of characters and a hashtag can convey the idea accurately. And 80's motivational posters communicate it with no words at all using a picture of a rock climber hanging off a cliff by one hand. The concept of hard work being part of the recipe for success is hardly abstract. I can practically touch hard work by wiping the sweat from my brow.
Hard work is ego-boosting. Even if success doesn't come for a while, the toil itself can make me feel that I am "better"; Better than my old self and, quite frankly, better than others who are not working as hard. Physical hard work is the most straight forward example of the ego boost of feeling better than an old self. I can put forth an extreme amount of effort and not be the winner of the race and even not meet personal goals, but yet feel accomplished, stronger, fitter, faster just by virtue of the work it self. Comparing myself to others that I deem to be not working hard can be a little self righteous and verge on an ugly judgmental posture, but I can't deny that the ego boost is there. Things that feel good are easy to pursue, even if that thing is hard work.
Hard work is a choice. I am in control. I decide if I am going to work hard on a particular task and I decide the degree of effort that I will put forth. No one can make me truly work hard. If I do not want to work hard at something, I will come up with excuses, I will tell myself that the task is not important, I will find work-a-rounds, I will procrastinate, I will put on a show of working hard without doing much of anything, I will barter or pay someone else to do the task. Many people will not face the truth that the barrier to them working towards a goal is their own lack of will, but once the choice is made to work hard, nothing can stop a person from following through.
Loving NOT working hard is much more difficult.
There are times that NOT working hard is the best course of action. This is a murkier path; one that defies logic, one that can leave a person second-guessing and doubting oneself, and one that takes a person out of the driver's seat.
This is not about being lazy or giving up. This is about knowing how to use external forces for advantage. Wrapping my mind around this concept, for me, is hard work.
When I nordic-skied competitively in high school and college, races were won on the uphills. Those who were the most fit and had the most internal grit, who would make their bodies give more even when it seemed like there was nothing else to give, those who worked hardest during practice and in the races found the benefit in all that effort when they passed their fellow skiers on 40, 50 , 60 degree inclines. Hard work seemed the obvious key.
But races were also won on the downhills. Those who could fold their bodies to be as aerodynamic as possible and put up the least resistance, who had a fearlessness that allowed gravity to carry them along sometimes faster than was comfortable, could make up ground quickly. Seemingly without effort they sailed by the hard worker who had just passed them moments before.
The same gravity that was so important to work against and overcome on the uphill became important to ally and cooperate with on the downhill.
I won't say that I ever mastered the downhill like I did the uphill, but at least in skiing there was the undeniable clue of the terrain in front of me. It was pretty easy to determine when I needed to work hard and when I needed to give in and be carried.
Other areas of life don't provide those obvious clues.
Or maybe they do.
I am getting some education about the need to relinquish control (and sometimes logic, and always self righteousness) as my children are entering adulthood. Perhaps I could have saved some heartache by viewing their change in age as obvious a clue as the change in slope on a ski trail.
Photo: Lexa Hoffner