LIFE IS HARD

I’ve vowed to be positive in the blog, so don’t get me wrong:  Life is Hard!  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.  See, we’ve been working hard on the farm.  Summer is a time of endless days and 7-day-work-weeks for weeks on end.  My husband puts in a full day as an attorney, then spends evenings doing hay or fixing equipment.  Even our kids have been working hard:  They don’t spend summer days lounging around the pool or the beach.  They are very involved in the quantity and quality of the work we do on the farm.   But this isn’t a terrible thing.  The Olympics also had me thinking:  I bet Michael Phelps would say life is hard too.  Bill Gates and Oprah are notorious work-a-holics as well.  But I don’t think any of them think working hard is a bad thing. 

I chuckle to myself when the kids I teach horseback riding lessons to tell me, “but _______ (fill in the blank with whatever we’re working on) is hard”.  (Note—they don’t usually say too hard, just hard.)  To which I reply:  “Yes!  It is hard!  So let’s get practicing!”  Sometimes I have to give the pep talk to myself.  When it’s 7pm and I’ve been working since 7am, and there are a couple more things to do and I’m dirty and tired; I try to think about all the good things about farming:  hey – I’m not sitting inside at a desk, I am my own boss, I get to do lots of different tasks in one day, I get to bring my kids to my workplace.  Just that change of focus takes me from “I’m tired and dirty” to “how great to have such a fulfilling, accommodating job”.

Maybe the connotation of the phrase Life is Hard can be reinvented with just a change of attitude:  We’ll substitute Life is Hard (hurrah!), for Life is Hard (bummer!).  What can you do to make your life a little harder?