A personal development workshop leader once explained to a retreat group I was a participant of, the idea the ‘hard path’ and the ‘easy path’ of personal change.
The concept itself, is fairly easy to grasp, though, there was a more powerful realisation he was trying to lead us to.
The hard path is where you develop the discipline to do things that are self-loving or supportive of your evolution. In other words, things like exercise, nutrition, meditation, good sleep, spending time in nature, doing things to nurture yourself, and so on.
The easy path, is where you don’t necessarily do any of those activities, or where you just do those things when you feel like it. For example, if you’ve had a tough day at work, you might return home, do some Facebook and social media, put your feet up on the couch and watch TV enjoying a bowl of ice cream before going to bed.
The easy path might also mean working until late without a break, living off stimulants like coffee and sugar, exercising whenever you get enough time to do so, and so on. Although, it could also be that you mix it up a bit. If you’ve had a hard day at work, sometimes you do come home and have a bath, and unwind before going to bed early, and sometimes you don’t.
In short though, on the easy path, if you’ve got time for self-care activities, that’s great, but they’re not necessarily something you do with any consistency.
The trainer’s point was, that the first path takes some discipline and effort, and therefore it’s the hard path. And while you don’t always see immediate benefit, over time, you will. With the ‘easy’ path, you also don’t see the immediate cost, but, over time, you will.
I apologise, because I can’t for the life remember how he drew the simple line diagram, so I can’t include it.
However, the bomb he was dropping was following: at some point, the paths actually cross, so that the hard path becomes the easy path, and the easy path becomes the hard path.
And that makes sense.
At some point, how you chose to live on the easy path catches up with you and so you might become sick, lethargic, exhausted, depressed, and so on. The potential consequences of walking the easy path are many and varied.
Of course, the opposite also holds. If you chose the ‘hard path’, after a while you see the outcomes reflected in better health, lower illness and disease, less stress, higher productivity, and so on.
The trainer stopped here with his analogy, leaving it at that its best you take the hard path, rather than the easy path.
What he missed was, that in order to get back onto the so-called ‘hard path’ from the easy path, it is now much more difficult.
This is because you don’t have the momentum of being on the ‘hard’ path (with all of the accumulated momentum of loving actions), and you have to have to battle with a body that is depleted and damaged by taking the easy path. So, if you came home from work exhausted and did Facebook and watched a movie until late with some ice cream, the next day you have to deal with the consequences of those choices, otherwise they will impact your next day as well. They can snowball, or have us in a constant cycle of depletion and relief.
In other words, you have to resurrect yourself before you can even really get back on the other path. And that likely takes more will and effort than actually just being on the hard path from the beginning.
But the trainer completely missed the real bomb.
And that is this.
The easy path actually is the harder path, and always was.
That it is ‘easy’, is a complete illusion.
And the so-called ‘hard-path’ actually always was the easy path.
The reason is simple.
It requires no effort in order to be yourself, and enormous effort not to.
Your body is constantly communicating to you what it needs, whether that is sleep, nutrition, to eat this food and not that food, movement, exercise, rejuvenation, to speak this way and not that, and so on. The more you listen to it, the easier it becomes to read that communication in detail. The less you listen to it, the louder it speaks and the more effort it takes to ignore it. If you get too far out, this is usually where illness and disease can come in to correct the loveless choices that have consistently been made.
Ultimately, if we hold activities which contribute to our wellbeing as a ‘hard’ path, then we have set ourselves up for failure, struggle and self-judgment and bashing before we have even begun. Thus, using the concepts of ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ make things way more difficult than they need to be.
It seems to me that what matters most, is what is ‘true’, something that is uniquely personal to each of us. Being responsive to honouring that which is true in our lives is the path which will inherently lead to well-being.