The Test --- GC Myers
In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.
—Henry Miller
This quote reminds me of all the times where I have spent innumerable hours trying to make a task easier when if I had just accepted the difficulty of the task and just went at it, the job would have been done by the time I finally got around to starting it in my supposed easier way.
It’s a curse and one I try to avoid but one I always seem to always slide back to. I guess because I’m a human and we always want the easy way. We might admire the person who grinds it out but we don’t want to be that person. We want to believe we are more clever than that, that we have all the answers and are above the need to sweat and toil. And this is so wrong, because the answers are in the sweat and toil.
We need to struggle. We need to test our will. We need the experience of the hard won victory.
We would be better for it and, in the aftermath, feel less the pressures and fears that come from avoiding the difficult in the first place.
Enough said. It’s still a long holiday weekend for many so why am I pushing so this morning? Leave it for another day…
The piece at the top is new, The Test, a small piece measuring 4″ by 6″ that is part of my upcoming show at the West End Gallery.
Redtree Times 
Miller was right, and so are you.
The biggest difference between today’s generations and those who came before may be that we have a choice about whether to embrace the sweat and toil.
Those who made this country really had no choice – if the trails were to be blazed, the prairie broken, the herds moved and the towns established, it was sweat and toil that would do it. No button pushing, no “virtual reality”.
Only a world to be made, and celebrated and enjoyed. Where we still can experience it, it’s the best experience in the world.
Your comment made me think. You’re right about our prior generations having no choice but to toil once they made the voyage here or started their westward journey across the country. Maybe it was the fact that they were making their own future with their work and saw the immediate effect of this labor that made it a preferable choice over staying put. For them, the work often symbolized their freedom to seek opportunity, something that we often fail to recognize today. We have many of the same opportunities if only we seek them and are willing to put in the work, hard as it may be.
Today, even though hard work is still rewarded, it is not celebrated in our reality show world filled with shortcut takers and a veneer of success without struggle. And that is a shame.