Everywhere I look, I can easily hear (or read) people saying that life is a real hard work. That presumption about life is everywhere, on reels on tik tok’s for you page, quotes on instagram, tweets on twitter, motivational speech on youtube, or even posts from random strangers on facebook!
The common message sounds be around the premise of life is hard work, we gotta get up every single morning, we gotta go to work from Monday — Friday, we gotta get stuck in traffic on the way to work, we gotta understand our colleagues and mingle with others, we gotta do our chores and take care of our family after work. On top of all that, you have to do your best. Mediocre seems to be unacceptable by the society, and you gotta listen to society too!
But, is that really the case? Is that really why we think of life as hard work?
I view life differently; I see living as the real hard work, the life itself just a blank canvas and it is up to us where we will take it or how we will enjoy it every second of it.
From my lens, life is not about going to the office to earn a salary, life is not about creating a perfect life, life is not about doing chores and making sure your house is really clean after your day job. Life should be about living.
Life is about living, it is about experiencing whatever this world brings to you (yes, the ups and downs), it is about enjoying the ride (the crazy moments and the less crazy moments), and it is also about balancing what you need to get vs. what you want. Those are the ones requiring hard work to be undertaken; getting to know yourself is a must for you to be able to start enjoying the ride and getting to know ourselves is not as easy as we thought (I’ll probably write about this next time)
Lots of difficult moments had made me realise that what makes life feels so hard is not the life itself. It is our tendency to make sure that we are doing the right things hence we keep focusing on the problem and our wish to see the problem solved; it blurs our ability to see through challenges or problems, to see the good in the not-so-good situation we are facing.
When I had a problem with my start-up business, my mind is going everywhere to find solution, my anxiety goes through the roof, and the only thing I have in mind is to make sure the problem goes away as soon as possible. Why? Because I had an impression that if I cannot make the problem goes away, I know people will think of me as a bad business woman.
Now that I am able to calm myself in any situation, I looked back, and realise that actually those problems are meant to be there and stay to show me how persistent I could be, to connect me to new people and broaden my horizon. I missed all that because my mind was too focus to make sure the problem goes away, it does not realise that there were opportunities along the journey.
I can say now that I am a true believer of the teaching that to be able to enjoy the ride (re: life), we need to be able to see through the challenges, problems, and each of the unpleasant moments we are experiencing. Imagine a road trip, you could be prepared for all sort of stuff from bringing snacks to ensuring you have basic medicine in case of emergency, but something you are not prepared for happen anyway, would you be upset for the entire trip? At some point you will accept it and get along with it, because you know you would want to enjoy that trip.
Imagine seeing life that way, how pleasant it would feel.
