Easy and Hard

It seems to me the thing that separates us the most it each of our individual abilities. The things that we choose to occupy our lives, the things we practice, the things we work towards. All different people, performing different roles. I guess some people choose the easy life, they choose not to challenge themselves and try to be the best at whatever, very few people can be called the best so most of us are happy as average. One of my beliefs is that perfect is not possible because it is so hard to achieve, and by being hard to achieve it is very easy to destroy. My own view is that there are forces of creation and destruction, perfect creation is easy to destroy so mostly our creations are average, only on occasion is genius easy.

At school I found science and maths easy, so i did them for A-level, I got the grades for university despite hardly working at all. But engineering for a career was not for me, I could pass the exams, again with very little work, but my mind had gone beyond science and when I discovered philosophy I was hooked. It presented a huge challenge that I wanted to accept, my mind was already tuned to the questions of philosophy and I believed I had some answers to the biggest questions. Of course I had not been good at writing whilst in school, or rather my english teachers thought I was no good at writing, but now I have self-published my own book, I think those teachers would be beyond shocked to hear I'd written a book. Before I learned to write I wanted to be a writer, I knew I had the ideas and I knew with enough hard work I could teach myself how to write. With a lot of hard work I achieved something at the edge of my creative ability, it was a wonderful achievement.

So much of what we find easy or hard goes back to our childhood and perhaps our genes. There is much in our lives that can't change, or rather with all the hard work in the world change only slightly. But we should all challenge ourselves, it's the best way of being content, to know that you always want to do better, to work at new things and try to improve. I have a guitar, but I am no guitarist, I've tried and tried but I get nowhere, so I gave up, I think about trying something different with it and maybe one day I will, but for now it feels impossible to be any good at it. My philosophy has been hard work, everyday I spend time thinking about my thesis, wanting to find new ways of answering the same questions. It's been nearly twenty years of reading the best writers and finding my own theories, but I enjoy the intensity of it all, my life cannot be without the constant thinking. When I do eventually write my philosophy book there will be a lot of people to thank and at the same time a lot of people to tell 'I told you so'. But talking about how we should support each other to improve is for a different blog, my own thoughts are reach for the sky and just keep picking yourself up again when you fall.