Life is Hard

Life is sometimes hard. It just is, no getting around it. It feels like it shouldn’t be. It seems to me it should just naturally flow in the right direction. We spend a lot of effort trying to make life something good and perfect, but it’s really just is what it is, our same life, even after all the effort. Kind of makes a person want to give up trying, and maybe they should.

I live in the desert. As I sit here looking out the window down the street, I see a row of houses, each with two trees in the yard. These trees are not indigenous to this climate. Without constant watering with water piped in from an artificial lake, they’d not make it one week in the summer. But the perfect American neighborhood with shade, grass and flowering plants appeals, so we do a lot of work to make it look that way despite the fact that we live in the desert.

As I look farther out my window I can see the massive buildings housing the Las Vegas casinos that promise fortune and a great time. The signs are shiny, bright and provocative and they make you believe that maybe you could have a share in the good life, even if just for a weekend. But those expensive buildings weren’t built with money the owners earned from giving out the good life. Odds are, you're lucky if you walk away with the same one you walked in with.

So maybe life doesn’t need us to dress it up. Maybe we should quit hoping the neon and the shade will make it better, and we live with the desert plants in the yard. If you look closely they have their own beauty, ruggedly surviving on an inch or two of water per year. Maybe it is okay that life is hard, we learn a lot in hard times, we do our changing and growing in hard times. Maybe that IS the natural flow. Maybe when we quit working to make it something it isn’t, we can embrace it and enjoy it for what it is: Life, that is sometimes hard.