Life is About Experiences

"From the time I was only six years old, I never forgot what I was told.  It was the best advice that I ever had.  It came from my wise and dear old dad.  He said, 'Sit down punk, I want to talk to you, and don't say a word until I'm through.  Now there's a time to laugh, a time to cry, a time to live and a time to die.  A time to break and a time to chill, to act civilized, or act real ill, but whatever you do in your life time, you never let an M.C. steal your rhyme.'  So from sixty-six to this very day, I'll always remember what he had to say." - Big Bang Hank, a.k.a. Imp the Dimp, a.k.a. Henry Jackson

Big Bang Hank, Master Gee, and Wonder Mike

I had always thought that Big Bang Hank and I had much more in common than our love for sweaters and pillbox hats, and it turns out I was right.  I had a very similar conversation with my dear old dad mom, except it wasn't really a conversation.  It kind of just happened out of the flow of a different conversation, which I don't really remember the details of (which means it might have been like the Big Bang family's discussion), but I do remember her telling me to "do hard things."

The "hard thing" she used as an example was putting up with me instead of sending me to the orphanage.

It's really, really easy to take the easy way out.  Really easy.  With almost every problem that we face there's an easy way to go about it and a hard way.  One route requires much more effort than the other, and one route leads us into the unknown while the other takes us back to the comfort zone.  And why should we ever leave our comfort zone?  There's a reason that it's comfortable.  And as you've said before, Young William, we should do the things that we love.  I love being in my comfort zone.

My mother says that you're wrong (And she's a very nice lady).

Taking the easy road and the hard road create much different final solutions, as Robert Frost once told us.  The easy road does allow us to reach our comfort zone, it allows us to go places that are familiar and be around people that are familiar.  There's nothing wrong with this.  This is totally understandable.  We all do it every single day.  The unknown is scary, and it's pretty much innate to avoid things that scare us.  It's much easier to go back to the people we know and the situations we know and just avoid the difficulties that come with accomplishing difficult feats.  But where does this get us?  Experiences help us grow.  Experiences make us who we are.  Without experiences, everybody is the same.

Think about it.  Accomplishments tell people very little about us.  Accolades and awards and achievements draw a very vague outline.  The color comes with stories.  A company would never hire an employee based solely off of their resume, they'd want an interview.  You would never go on a first date and simply list off a bunch of things that you'd done, you'd tell people about you (jersey chasers and athletes excluded).  The things that we're proud of are the things that we've overcome, the things that we've beaten, the things that we were able to do that very few other people are able to do.  These are the things that our friends tell their friends about.  These are the things that make us walk a little taller, make us hold our chin up a little higher, these are things that people can't touch.  The rewards we get are great, but they really wouldn't mean anything if it weren't for we didn't have to work for it.  Common rule of economics: If there's a high supply of something, the demand goes down, as does the value.  Therefore, if something is readily available to everybody, it won't mean as much, and everybody will have it.  If everybody has it, that really doesn't make it as cool.  According to Jimmy Dugan, manager of the Rockford Peaches, "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great."  Fifteen years ago, hitting 60 home runs was considered elite, but thanks to a bunch of jerks (three in specific) who took the easy way out, it was devalued, and now Roger Maris and Babe Ruth really aren't seen as the specimens that they once were.

Anybody can do things the easy way.  Anybody can cop out and do things that everybody else is doing.  It takes special people to be able to say "screw this, I'm doing my own thing," and then go out and do it. 

If the easy things are a walk in the park, the hard things are a twelve round, knock-down, drag-out, can't lift your arms slugfest against life.  It's not fun in any traditional sense, but it is fun because you're the underdog, because you get to prove everyone wrong, because you get to accomplish something that very few people can actually accomplish, and whether or not you achieved anything, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you tried.  In a poll of LtP staff, the unanimous result was that there was nothing worse than never having tried.  It's much better to fight and fight and fight and lose than to never have given it a shot to avoid failure.  Either way you're in the same place.  You lack the same spoils of victory, but when you don't try, you'll have "what ifs" in the back of your mind for as long as you have a pulse.

There's no reason to make things unnecessarily hard; that gets us nowhere and that's not what I'm trying to suggest.  We shouldn't climb a mountain to buy more toilet paper, but when given a difficult or scary opportunity, we should be open-minded enough to accept the challenge.  We should want to have an arsenal of stories to tell the grandkids, we should want to have them to be proud of, we should want to have them to be able to grow towards who we truly are.  At the end of the day, it won't matter what we have.  You can't take what you have with you, but you can take what you do with you.  Experiences don't weigh us down, they lift us up, and we have an infinite amount of space for them.  They can't be controlled by shelves or by standards or by the number of carry-ons allowed or by the government or by anybody.  Life is about experiences, and the best ones, the most valuable ones, are the ones that come from doing the difficult things that seem daunting.  If we turn and run from these, we will never know the height of our true potential, and if we face them, we'll find that our potential reaches much higher than we ever could have imagined.