October 20, 2007
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The Right Kind of Hard
About a week ago I was in a strange state where I felt I really couldn’t write anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write anything or that I couldn’t find the words or the inspiration. No, my mind was a flood of words and thoughts. My heart was filled with ideas and dreams. And yet I couldn’t write. Everything that mattered to me to say was too hard to say and everything that didn’t matter made me feel terrible to say it. I felt lost and upset and it hurt. Writing is my escape. It keeps me sane. To be in a state where the pleasure of writing alludes me is a painful thing. But I just… didn’t want to write. I had started to doubt the very value of writing or its point. Writing never changed anything real in this world I thought. People do and we suck at it.
Somehow though as sure as the sun rises I started to write again a few days later. I didn’t write anything super important or super significant to what had been bothering me, but some thoughts came to the forefront of my mind as if beating upon my brain trying to get themselves out and I couldn’t help it. I had to write it. And so I did.
It was hard. So hard. A part of me didn’t want to write, didn’t trust what I was saying. I was afraid of how it could be taken and terrified of its effect. Worse, it bothered me that I was writing what I was writing and not all the other things I wished I was writing, all the other things I needed to write. I felt twisted between doing too much and too little, between caring and not caring, between wanting and fearing.
And yet, somehow I wrote it anyway, and after that I found the block was over, I could write again, about anything and about everything. It still wasn’t easy. It has never been easy. Each moment I set my hands to my keyboard I feel it is a struggle to bring the right words together, to make it matter. It’s hard work. There’s just no way around that. For me, writing doesn’t come easily.
I looked and it was only Tuesday. It felt like a life time, but it was barely three days. However, at the end of it as I wrote that first real piece I remember having this thought as clear as day. This is the right kind of hard for me. That’s what I thought. That’s what I think now.
There are all kinds of hard things you do in your life. Sometimes you do physical labor. Sometimes you face embarrassment and social awkwardness. Sometimes you do endless sleepless activity. Sometimes you face mental challenges of extraordinary difficulty. But these tasks, though all difficult, don’t mean the same things to everyone.
Some are perfectly at home striving to solve a particularly tricky puzzle. They love it. It’s hard, it could take them weeks, but they strive on the challenge and triumph in their victory. Solving a mental puzzle is the right kind of hard for them. It’s a challenge that matters to them.
Others are at home when they are incredibly busy. The work need not be particularly hard to comprehend nor any particularly task hard to complete. But the constant exhausting activity is what makes them feel successful. Being the person who is always there, always available and willing to go the extra mile above and beyond the call of duty, that’s what makes them happy.
So I wonder if life is about finding that thing that is the challenge that is right for you. You don’t want to do things that are too easy of course. You rarely get lasting satisfaction from floating through something. But at the same time, mere challenge for challenge’s sake doesn’t really complete you either. Just because something is hard for you, doesn’t mean you feel as if it is worth your time to do, nor does it mean you’ll feel good doing it.
No. You have to find something that is hard but in just the right way. You are looking for something that pushes you but in the directions you want to go. Something where you feel good about your successes and feel complete while struggling to overcome your weakesses. Something that makes you feel as if you are growing each and every time you do it.
I used to say that I don’t feel as if I’ve ever done anything really hard. But when I look back honestly I see now that that just isn’t even half way true. I’ve done all sorts of hard things. I’ve faced complex challenges in math and programming that I could barely wrap my mind around even after hours of effort. I dealt with twisted philosophical problems that were a struggle to comprehend much less explain. I’ve done the all nighters. I’ve felt the feeling of working through the early mornings to fix weird problems with osbscure difficult to identify solutions. I’ve faced challenges with dealing with weird personality conflicts, and helped mediate resolutions of minor social disagreeements. I’ve done the physical labor thing too, pushed my body to the point of exhaustion. I’ve done all kinds of hard things. All kinds.
Just never for very long. I start a challenge and for a while I meet it. But then I feel no satisfaction or joy. No completion. No anything at all really. Whether I succeed or fail I just can’t find myself caring at all. And then I just stop doing it. Or I continue to do it in such a lackluster fashion that I might as well have never done it at all. Sure it’s hard, in a way, but that isn’t enough. I just feel empty. I find myself hating it and then hating myself for being unable to follow through with it too.
And when you try to explain this to people you get the weird looks. People don’t get it. Work ethic is work ethic to them. Hard work isn’t the goal, its the means to obtain the goal to them. And to them, whatever hard work they are doing now that helps them achieve their goal is what you should be doing. Many don’t even realize that they’ve already found the right kind of hard work for them and that they are doing it. It never occurs to them that one’s work could be challenging in an unsatisfying way. Or perhaps they haven’t found it, that right kind of challenge, but they’ve lived a life such that it never occurred to them that there could be a hard work that is satisfying of its own account.
But the truth is some kinds of hard work fulfills us and others just don’t. And everybody is a little bit different about what constitutes which. But we’re all the same in that as long as we are still looking for the kind of hard that does that for us, we can’t really be completely satisfied. We’ll always feel a little bit empty, a little bit incomplete, no matter how capable we are at meeting the challenges put before us.
Sometimes when I write, it feels like I may have found that kind of hard. It isn’t something I can ever stop because I am bored or because I am unsatisfied or because it hurts too much to do it. No matter how hard it gets I just keep wanting to do it. I keep needing to do it. And so I do it. Writing is like that for me. Sometimes. That’s why I write.
