When the Going Doesn’t Need to Be So Tough

I often error on the side of struggle. In many ways, I’m attracted to difficulty. But, here’s the deal..

Life isn’t that hard, guys.

Every now and then, you need to call yourself on your bullshit, or maybe you’ll be lucky enough to have someone else call you on it. In any case, I see this in other people around me, too.

Let me give you a silly example. Just this weekend, I was making some more atlas stones for this weekend’s ‘Precious Stones’ event. Imagine mixing concrete, stone molds, shovels, dust, rocks, and everything is wet. The next day I took the stones out of the molds and had to clean the molds before putting them away.

The last time I did this I sat on a bucket in the yard at DEUCE with a hose, an industrial cleaning brush, and a pile of rags. I sat for hours scrubbing these damn things, inefficiently getting them “sort of clean.”

This time around I was dreading it. It was going to be such hard work on a Sunday – UGH! Poor me.  Plus, I didn’t have the rags or the brush this time. “There goes my Sunday,” I thought.

Reluctantly, I sat down with the hose and some paper towels. I gave the molds a squirt and wiped them with the feeble paper towels only to be surprised at how simply the wet concrete came off. “Wow! How easy is that?” I thought.

The first time I did this, I just assumed it would be hard and guess what? It was hard. I made it so. There’s no doubt about that. As it turns out, it wasn’t nearly as bad the second time around and sure as hell didn’t need to be so hard the first time around, either.

I find myself doing this all the time. “Ugh! Everything is such a struggle… but put your head down and grind, Logan.” Yet, every now and then I wise up and ask myself, “But, is it really?”

Life’s hard. Yadda yadda. But, when you think about it, it’s not that damn bad, guys. In fact, it’s exactly as hard as you make it. So, chill out and don’t take yourself so damn seriously.

I’ll try to do the same. Enjoy the day!

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach