I’m not sure if everyone does this, but I often find I have to shock myself out of a train of thought that might be painful, degrading, or just embarrassing. I have to interrupt myself with words, or sometimes even noises. For instance, when I think about the time I stupidly asked a female friend of mine, “Do you wanna go out sometime?” and she said, “Why?”, I may suddenly grunt, cough, or make a noise like a gay air-raid siren recovering from a minor virus in order to interrupt that train of thought and get something more productive on the rails. I do the same with disparaging thoughts. The two most common phrases I say to interrupt these trains are “Fight on” and “Do hard things.” And I say them a lot to myself these days.
I have this theory that breaks down life into a horribly simplistic dichotomy: either I can choose to do easy things or I can choose to hard things. Now, I think we are all given this talk by that disciplined father, that hyped-up teacher, or that slightly intoxicated football coach, and we tend to think of it in the context of a single play, paper, or life choice. But I have this…I dunno, let’s call it a goal: I must always be doing something hard.
For most of us who will be reading this on a functional screen with a reliable internet connection, our world doesn’t really push us to do anything hard. In fact, it really just pushes us to exist. We don’t have a lot of reason to do hard things—we don’t have freedom to attain, or human rights to establish, or our own survival to worry about. In many ways, we don’t even realize we’re choosing to do easy things, because we were born into it or it has been our reality for so long that we think of returning a Redbox movie as doing something hard.
Now, I’m certainly not discounting those of us who encounter tough circumstances. Life throws hard things at us sometimes and forces us to deal with them. Cars break down, houses catch on fire, and loved ones are diagnosed with terminal illnesses. But what I want to talk about is the choice we make to do hard things. I want to talk about the things we have an innate desire to change, either about ourselves or our world, that we either decide to do something about or we don’t.
Ghana nags at me, as does all of Africa, really. I have been there and I have seen a beautiful place and wonderful people held down by ancient, racist doctrines that enforce a distinct lack of educational opportunity, which in turn reinforces those obsolete racist ideas. Now, I saw this problem, I recognized my own ability to aid in the fields of literacy and literature education in Ghana, and that forced me to make a choice.
Humans hate to make choices.
Easy or hard. The easy thing was to talk about what I had seen and say, “It really made me appreciate what I have here in America.” And for a while, that’s what I did. But as any person reading this can probably testify, recognizing the problem—seeing an injustice—eats at you. Why do you think documentaries exist? And that’s when we have to make a choice: hard or easy.
Maybe you’re suffocating in a job that pays you too well to leave (my friends know who I’m talking about). You think that you’re doing something courageous by sticking it out despite your distinct lack of daily fulfillment, but that’s the easy choice. Leaving a well-paying job with no idea how you’re going to get by except to do something that appeals to your God-given humanity and dreams? That’s hard.
Maybe your relationship is suffering on account of your own complacency (you’re in good company). Once you recognize that problem, you have a choice: change nothing and hope the other person picks up your slack, or the other option…which is hard.
Generally speaking, maintaining the status quo is a choice to do easy things.
I’m trying to build a literacy center in Ghana, West Africa with no career, no background in non-profits, and limited life experience. Asking people for money is so difficult that sometimes I think that I got into the wrong—DO HARD THINGS. I have no business attempting business plans and grant applications with organizations that are way out of—DO HARD THINGS. I’m running out of energy fast and I just don’t know if I’m going to make—DO HARD THINGS.
We all have these choices we need to make, and it sucks. Personally, I’d love to hand in my grown-up card, go back to daycare, and play Nintendo most of the time. But then I remember that all positive change was caused by people who chose to do hard things. I remember that anything worth having is worth fighting for. And with that, I invite you to do hard things too, because there two things that I know: 1) you are capable and 2) it’s already eating at you.
