It Shouldn’t Be This Hard (Or Should It?)
Yesterday was a hard day. It wouldn’t really help for me to explain why, especially because, by the time you read this “yesterday” won’t be the day I was talking about anyway.
Photo Credit: Oleh Slobodeniuk, Creative Commons
But it was one of those days, and you know the ones I’m talking about—the sleep-past-your-alarm, realize-your-favorite-shirt-is-in-the-wash, spill-toothpaste-on-your-other-shirt, change-three-times, late-to-your meeting, spill-your-coffee, lock-your-keys-in-your-car kind of day.
Everything was harder than it needed to be.
Well, harder than I thought it should be, in all my glory.
And all day I couldn’t get this mantra off my mind: It shouldn’t be this hard.
I don’t know where I picked up this little gem, but I was sure carrying it around like it was my baby. It shouldn’t be this hard to order a cup of coffee. It shouldn’t be this hard to get through airport security. It shouldn’t be this hard to find an outlet where I can plug in my computer. It shouldn’t be this hard to get a customer service representative to help me!
IT SHOULDN’T BE THIS bleeping HARD!
And of course, since I was having such a stellar day, I figured I would call my husband.
Because what husband doesn’t want to hear from his wife when’s she has totally lost sight of all reality? Duh. So I picked up the phone and dialed, ready to unload my burden and fully counting on him to fix everything. Except, as chance would have it, he wasn’t having a stellar day, either.
Within the first two minutes of our conversation I could tell he didn’t really want to talk to me (I mean… I can’t imagine why).
He was busy at work, he said calmly, and he didn’t have time to fix this for me. I would be fine, he told me, and gave me a few pieces of advice. We hung up the phone, and I was already seething to myself. Should it really be this hard to communicate? To get some help?
Now that I’ve calmed down, my “it shouldn’t be this hard” rant has me thinking.
Maybe it should be this hard.
Maybe everything in life worth doing is hard. Maybe sometimes we make it harder than it needs to be but, for the most part, even the simple things in life have their way of being complicated. Maybe a simple life isn’t the kind of life we want anyway. Is that possible?
And as I think back now, it makes me realize that hard days are the days which really help me understand my character.
The impatience, the silent seething, the raising my voice to get my way—I’d like to think I was better than all of that (“Sorry, I was just having a bad day”), but the truth is I’m not. The truth is it wasn’t a bad day that brought it out of me. It was there all along.
And without bad days, I might never know it was there, and might never have a chance to overcome it.
So here’s to bad days—in case you’ve ever had one; in case you’re having one now.
Maybe it isn’t “supposed to be” this hard, but maybe it is. Maybe life is hard, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe “hard” is what’s fashioning us into the people we’ve always wanted to be.
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