The main boundary we have to cross in the transition between childhood and adulthood is the ability to accept frustrations without breaking down. A child cannot accept the word “no”. The child’s world is destroyed. A mature person is supposed to learn from his or her life experience, that they cannot get everything, and they are supposed to be able to say “I don’t have everything I want and that is okay”.
The truth is that everyone is always looking for the easy road, even if by doing so we hurt the things which are most important to us.
But most of us have not learned anything. Just think about how you react when you don’t get what you think you deserve. It seems that we have not yet acknowledged the fact that life is difficult for everyone, but it is much more difficult for those who expect it to be easy.
It is much easier for us to justify and explain our actions than apologize for them.
It is much easier for us to make promises than to keep them.
It is much easier for us to criticize someone else than to criticize ourselves.
It is much easier for us to lecture someone else on how to manage their life than for us to best manage our own.
It is much easier for us to expect an apology than to apologize.
It is much easier for us to forgive our own mistakes than someone else’s.
It is much easier for us to blame someone else than to acknowledge our own blame.
It is much easier for us to look for excuses rather than acknowledge our own mistakes.
It is much easier for us to remember the good things we do than the good things the other does.
It is much easier for us to think about what we don’t have rather than be thankful for what we do have.
The easiest road is to do today exactly what we’ve done yesterday. That is the reason why it is so difficult for us to change our approaches and stop hurting and invalidating, stop being angry and resenting, stop blaming and commenting, stop complaining and whining, stop feeling sorry for ourselves and stop ignoring the other’s distress.
We are used to this, we know this, we feel comfortable with this. No thinking is required, no overcoming, no effort. And this is the easy road: going into automatic mode and enabling it to operate us as it wishes. It is just a shame that in the meantime we ruin days, relationships and entire lives for ourselves.
But life is a hard-knock-school, and a matriculation certificate is only given to those who understand that the elevator to maturity is broken, and only to those who are willing to climb and go up step-by-step in order to learn every lesson that life places on our path.
So that’s it, stop searching for the easy road and start walking down the right one: understand that it is more important to prevent a fight than to prove that we are right, that it is more important to look within ourselves than to blame the other, and that it is more important to focus on what unifies than on what separates.