On Letting Things Be Hard
A small permission for those of us who have been trying to make every difficulty easier than it actually is.
There is a habit, in our culture, of trying to make every hard thing easier than it is.
We try to talk ourselves out of grief. We try to reframe disappointment. We try to "find the lesson" in a difficult day, sometimes before the day has even ended. We have read enough self-help to believe that any pain, properly handled, can be metabolized within a week.
This is, sometimes, true.
It is mostly not true.
Some things in life are simply hard. They are hard the way winter is hard — for a while, with no shortcut, until they are not. To pretend otherwise is to add a small extra suffering on top of the original one: the suffering of I should not still be feeling this way.
I want to argue, briefly, that you are allowed to find a thing hard for as long as it takes.
What this looks like
You can be sad about the friendship that ended, three months later, even though you "should" be over it. You can be unsettled by the decision you made, six months later, even if the decision was correct. You can find Mondays heavy. You can find some weeks heavy in a way that does not respond to morning routines.
You do not have to perform okayness. You especially do not have to perform okayness for yourself, in the privacy of your own thinking.
The small reframe
What if the hard things you are walking through were not problems to be solved on a faster timeline, but seasons to be walked through at their own pace?
Winter is not a problem to be optimized. Winter is winter. You don't fight it. You wear more layers. You sleep earlier. You wait. Spring comes, in its own time, and not by your doing.
Some hard periods of life are like this. They are not failures of your meditation practice. They are not signs that you are doing something wrong. They are just seasons. The work is to keep walking, gently, while they last.
A small line
A line I keep written down, from a teacher I had years ago: the long way is the short way.
Most attempts to take the short way through hard feelings end up adding years. The slow, attentive, patient walk through the difficulty — that is the actual short way. It feels long because you are doing it instead of skipping it.
Let it be hard for as long as it is hard. Tend to yourself with the same patience you would offer a friend who was going through what you are.
The season will turn. It always does. You do not have to hurry it.