Beautiful People, You Can Do Hard Things.
I think I saw this quote on a t-shirt or a postcard, and it’s been plastered all over my mind for months. It’s a tricky little bit of copy. On the one hand, it’s an encouragement, because we can do hard things. History is lousy with accounts of people who did unspeakably hard things. On the other hand, it’s a bit of an admonishment…because we have this irksome habit of not doing the hard things, even when they’re also good things, necessary things.
I teach philosophy to kids, and I’m always telling parents and teachers, over and over again, that they can (and should) expect excellence from young thinkers. Philosophy is hard, but kids can do it. Learning to argue properly, disagree peacefully, and take one’s own questions seriously are all hard. We so often let kids off the hook because we think they can’t handle big ideas, that they won’t be able or willing to express themselves fully. We assume that kids can’t do hard things like this, when they really can. Many of them even want to.
And if I’ve learned anything over the past two and a half years, two and a half years of wicked, brutal hard stuff, it’s that this letting children off the hook with hard things is a giant chunk of projection on our part. We’ve convinced our big-people selves that because we’re up against an awful lot, and we don’t know where to begin, or how to get through it, that the little people around us couldn’t possibly make heads or tails of it either. It’s scary for an adult to see a child tackling hard stuff that we wouldn’t dare go near.
Can you blame us big people? Look at the hard things we’ve been asked to do. Shut down the world so we don’t make each other sick. Cure a disease in record time. Help our kids learn at home. Keep a roof over head and put food on the table as the job market turns into a pumpkin. Venture out into the chaos to do jobs that can’t be done in isolation. Fight back boredom, loneliness, fear, and apathy. Do stuff like wear masks and get shots to protect the vulnerable (I’d like to go on record as saying that this last one isn’t really that hard).
And then there’s this: the recognition that what was isn’t there anymore, that somewhere in the chaos, the world we knew, the lives we knew, maybe even the people we knew, dissolved like cotton candy in a puddle. As we’ve emerged from our cocoons, weary and unsure, we’ve gotten stubbornly sentimental over a way of life that is no longer sustainable. We’re stomping our feet and wishing that nothing will change, when the change already happened. It may have been happening for a long, long time.
And this is served up with a side of realizing that we’re going to have to figure out a new way to be, to relate to one another, to do things. This is the hardest of all hard things. We’re starting over, after being worn out to our very core. The training wheels are off, and we have to pedal like crazy and steer in some sort of new direction. Ugh. I’m still trying to figure out whether the sheer number of us on the planet is an asset or a liability. Do many hands make light work with hard stuff, or do too many cooks spoil it?
The pessimist in me knows and ruefully admits that as low as the bar has been set for human behaviour and relations these past two or so years, it can still go lower- much, much lower (throws up in mouth a little bit). And we’re letting it go lower, because it’s hard to do otherwise. I know full well that even as we try to do better, be better, think better, there will be backlash.
But there’s an annoying little voice in my head that keeps reading that stupid quip over and over again. Beautiful people, you can do hard things. When I’m restless and can’t sleep, I go through my family tree and re-read the stories of seriously hard things my ancestors overcame. If they hadn’t, if it just weren’t possible, I wouldn’t be here, telling my brain to shush in the wee hours. I read a little history, marvel at our resilience, and wonder about the tremendous acts of persistence and courage that were never captured in the records. I pour through accounts from people right now who are struggling in ways I’ll never fully understand.
Difficult, annoying, inconvenient, and frightening are not the same as impossible, and it’s time we started expecting excellence from ourselves.