Life Is Difficult - But You Get To Choose

Life is difficult, filled with struggle and pain - but that is exactly what gives it meaning. Discover why challenges are not obstacles, but the path to growth, choice, and true transformation. Life is difficult. It is full of suffering, struggle, and pain. That is a fact—or, as Buddhist teachings hold, merely a reliable sign that we are alive. For the moment we die, all of life’s hardships—and with them, all of our possibilities—cease. So once we accept this fact, we can move on to the next thought: life is difficult, and that is actually very good news. It is difficult because it is full of challenges, and if they weren’t difficult, they wouldn’t be challenges at all; without them, we would not grow. None of us was given life to spend our time as parasites, feeding off others. Time was not given for laziness, idleness, or cowardice, but to create. To build a truly magnificent life for ourselves. Life always unfolds according to our choices, even if it doesn’t always appear that way—and this is good news, because it represents an enormous opportunity. It means that no matter how compromising, weak, unhappy, or unfortunate our lives have been until now, we have the right to change. We have the right to transform ourselves and make different choices.

Everyone has the right to forgive themselves—no one else’s forgiveness will help—and to move forward. To forgive ourselves for cowardice, for making excuses, for bureaucratic habits, for pointing fingers at others—we did the best we could at that time, there’s nothing wrong with that, now we move on. What awaits us in this new direction will certainly be difficult—very difficult—just as difficult as a compromising life, only in a different way. “Where does your courage come from?” people around me often ask. Honestly, I don’t know. Once I asked Petra to say something about my courage based on my horoscope. “I’ve thought about it too,” she replied, “but just as anything is possible in your chart, nothing really explains why you are so wild. Perhaps it’s your Uranus, one of the markers of your personality, which belongs fundamentally to inventors and eccentrics. Don’t get excited—you’re not an Einstein! You’re among the wild ones, but not really. If there’s a secret, which I only half-believe, it’s that you choose to live your life this way.” And I think that is mostly the truth. I choose the direction of my life. I don’t listen to anyone else; this is my one life, and I decide and act. —Agatha Seymour /This piece was written years ago. As I return, it finds its place here once again, unchanged./