Life is difficult.
This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others.
I know about this moaning because I have done my share.
-- M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
It’s not often, “fair”.
That said, a lot of the time the rocks in the road are the ones we put there outselves, or the ones we actually swerve to hit in a pique of self-will run riot.
The trick, I find, is to keep your expectations low, and to run the train loose on life’s poorly maintained tracks.
What’s that mean? Just this: plan for failure. The paint may be the wrong color, the item delivered broken,
Assume everyone is doing their best, no matter how incompetent the results.
Assume that most people are self-interested, and you will rarely be wrong.
Assume there will be as many downturns in fortune as upticks in circumstances.
One thing is for sure: while everyone gets a different roll of the dice, the world does not wake up in the morning to conspire against us. The world simply does not care. It does not think about us for one second, and will not miss us when we are gone.
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