It isn’t uncommon, regardless of age, to hear people exclaim: “But it’s too hard!”
We don’t like life to be hard. We avoid life circumstances when they are hard, unless those circumstance feed our soul and nourish our spirit.
Most of our lives are spent attempting to be invulnerable from risk. When life gets hard we feel vulnerable. We feel exposed, incompetent. We think that we should know how to do every aspect of life perfectly. But the truth is, we can’t know something we’ve never experienced before. We can’t know how to do something well without putting ourselves through dedicated practice. To learn anything required intention, dedication, willingness to be not good at something until you get good at something.
George Leonard wrote a very short book a long time ago called Mastery. I read that book numerous times because it allowed me to see that at whatever level of mastery you are at, you will still be challenged to master another level. Life is a never ending process of learning to be a master of being you.
Aging like a guru means willingly allowing yourself to be vulnerable to yourself as you learn how to learn how to be you. Yep, that’s not a typo! You have to learn how to learn to be you. That’s hard work!
