Challenging, difficult and hard

An idea that helps me keep perspective is the difference between challenging, difficult and hard.

Regardless of who we are, life challenges us. We always have problems to solve and ups and downs to deal with. That’s just life. Challenges make life interesting, fun even.

Every once a while, life gets difficult. These are typically times when we are pushed to our limits, overwhelmed and/or clueless. Difficulty is generally due to the effect day-to-day living has on our minds. In the words of Scott Peck, the best antidote to dealing with this difficulty is accepting that life is difficult. For, once we truly accept something is difficult, it ceases to be so.

Finally, for everyone who is reading this, it is likely that life is never hard. Hard is when you have to struggle for the basics, toil in the sun to get food on the table or hope for someone’s generosity to fill your stomach for the day. Everyone reading this has luckily escaped hard. In fact, it is on folks like us to remove “hard” from those who experience it.

And, the first step to doing that is to make sure we don’t lose perspective ourselves.