What’s Easy and What’s Difficult?

Article By Delia Steinberg Guzmán

We usually follow what is easy for us or what we master. However, Seneca argues: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult”. In order to grow, we have to face the unknown. Why wait?

Easiness per se does not exist. If we ask each person what they consider to be difficult, everyone will have a different answer. There are things that we know and can do, and there are things that we do not know and cannot do.

What has been assimilated is easy

What we have already learned to do is easy, because that is what we have mastered and can perform comfortably. What has been learned and assimilated manifests itself through easy and confident acts in life.

What is not known is difficult

Similarly, difficulty per se does not exist. It depends on the person and his or her accumulated knowledge. What we do not know and is new to us wears the mask of difficulty.

It is likely that to avoid facing a situation, we continue labelling something as “difficult” for many years. But that something is in fact not so much unknown or new as it is a repeated and feared situation. This means that it has not been truly confronted and experienced.

The experience of fear of something new prevents us from mastering what is difficult.

It is by not succumbing to fear itself that we will be able to overcome difficulties in life.

Difficulties are part of life

It is natural to have plenty of difficulties in life. We have all come into this world to learn, to acquire new knowledge, and to help our souls awaken and open up to wisdom. If at some point everything becomes easy, we should take it as a warning: either we have become stuck in our learning process for a long time, or we have become so oblivious that we can’t even recognize the next steps in our ascending path.

Difficulty is what needs to be conquered

What is difficult is what confronts us at our current stage of spiritual evolution and it is also what we need to acquire at this moment in our personal development. It appears to us as a challenge, but it is an indispensable exercise to ensure that our experiences reach our consciousness, and do not just touch us superficially.

What is easy already belongs to me. What is difficult is what I need to develop.

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Image Credits: By Sasquatch I | Flickr | CC BY 2.0