PULL HARD, HANG ON TIGHT, let me outta here …
Saturday, January 16, 2021 - daily column #6639
Hard work is not its own reward.
It’s just work.
It’s just hard.
It’s just sweat.
But, work with a purpose?
Now we’re talking sweet-tasting sweat and life-affirming work.
Still incredibly hard.
The notion of a charmed or easy life is fantasy, one painted by advertising copywriters and Hollywood movie marketers. True, a life we might like for that day or for a one-week fantasy vacation. But we’ll be aching for someone to yell, “Cut!” so we can return to reality…
So, if we aren’t working for the hard work, just to own the hardness of it, what are we working for?
When I was young, I thought hard work was a way to pay bills, establish a home, sustain and raise a family, take vacations, and wear our lifestyle on our sleeves – like a merit badge defined by house size, the quality of our possessions, and a cool car on the driveway. I’ve done all those things, had those things, lost those things, readjusted my wants and needs several times, and I’m still really into hard work.
I knew then and still know what it is.
But still, I frequently question, ‘why it is’?
Don’t worry – don’t crawl back in the womb; it’s mostly great out here in the fresh air of the world (all recent TV news to the contrary), good people everywhere!
Life involves work, hard work. Good work. Easy work. Easy times. Time away from work. Time away from easy. It’s a circle/cycle of spreading our wings and soaring high; it’s diving hard toward a target with an accelerating risk of spectacular crashing …
The meaning of life is a never-ending quest – and mankind has always sought to find within it a philosophy, teaching, dogma, wisdom of elders, or in an easy-read book on a shelf. I often talk about Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. And I often quote Anaïs Nin’s, “And the day will come when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
The shortness of every human life, even with my outsized expectation of reaching 115, is less than a moment in time when compared to the age of this planet. You might argue it is a mathematical exaggeration because we should remember it took billions of years of evolving life to get to the first ‘human-like’ creature and then only 200,000 years to get to here, to now. And, you could argue that we should only count the time since the renaissance …
Yes, it all gets silly.
Because we can control, barely, only one relatively short life.
Only one person in control.
Everything that matters, and the only things that matter, are what matters to you – for you, about you, about your world, about your life.
Nobody else gets to wear the credit or shoulder the blame, or survive the shame.
It’s everyone for themselves.
It’s like the world is shooting a spit-wad with an elastic band, shooting us from birth to death.
At moments it seems to drag forever, but we must enjoy our ride because it is so precariously short.
Pull as hard as you can and let it fly …
In every moment, life is incredibly complex and fascinating, excruciating, explosively passionate, and the most beautiful struggle. Like the rosebud. Like a pregnant belly where we’ve all begun as precious personalities who’ve been flailing around too long – full of purpose and promise, crying, “Let me outta here … ”
Whether we die today, or are born today, it is that way.
And, if you are already here, it is never too late to be re-born full of zeal, and glee, and great hope for everything ahead of us.