The Beauty of Struggle
Yesterday I was in a yoga pose, and midway through the pose I realized I could be pushing myself harder. I put in a lot more effort, and I could feel how much more my muscles were engaged, even though the gain I made by all that extra effort in terms of what the pose looked like from the outside was negligible.
It reminded me of an experience I had over ten years ago. I was helping a friend out by watching her baby for her. At one point, the baby was lying on the floor on his belly on a blanket, and there was a cat laying down about a foot away from him.
Man, he really, really wanted to touch that cat. But he couldn’t. He hadn’t learned to crawl yet. He hadn’t learned to turn over yet. So I watched, fascinated as he struggled and strained and reached his hand toward the cat. Despite all his best efforts, his little arms were not a foot long, and he couldn’t move his torso yet, so he fell short of touching the cat by just a few inches.
It was frustrating for him. He wasn’t upset enough to cry, yet I could see his face contort and hear his little grunts of effort and exasperation and see that it wasn’t pleasant for him to want something that despite all his best efforts he could not get.
I considered helping him move so that he could touch the cat, yet I chose not to. My reasoning was twofold. First, I considered the cat. I thought the cat didn’t want to be touched by the baby, or it would have moved closer to him, and that if I moved the baby, the cat would just feel molested and remove itself from the situation anyway.
Second, I considered the baby. I saw how the struggle to reach the cat was helping the baby more than me moving him to touch the cat would. As he squirmed around trying to figure out how to make his hand reach a few inches farther, he was exercising his core muscles, making them stronger. His brain was also getting a workout, gathering feedback that would one day allow the neural pathways to form that would let him roll over and crawl by knowing which muscles to contract and which to relax and in what order. What I was watching was learning and growth in process, and I didn’t want to arrest it by putting him closer to the cat and taking his struggle away.
That experience helped me see struggle as a positive thing. Yesterday in my yoga pose, when I increased my effort without getting much visible result, I thought of that baby unable to reach that cat and I smiled inside, knowing that my extra sweat and effort was creating change inside myself even if it was invisible to the naked eye. I couldn’t measure the change happening, yet I could measure my effort, so I was happy that I had managed to increase it.
Sometimes life is not about struggle. Sometimes life is about being in the flow, experiencing synchronicities stack up until it feels as though the universe itself is rolling out the red carpet for you and everything is an effortless joy. If I had used my superior strength and muscle coordination to pick up the baby and help him pet the cat, he would have been getting the red carpet ride.
In the case of the baby, it’s easy to see that if he had a telepathic parent (or babysitter) who could fulfill his every desire with no struggle on his part, his personal development would suffer. If he never had to use his own muscles, their strength wouldn’t develop and his brain wouldn’t learn how to coordinate them.
I suspect that in my life, struggle similarly shows me where my leading edge of growth is. After all, if I already knew how to do something, it wouldn’t be a struggle. I still get frustrated sometimes when I’m struggling. Although it’s unpleasant, I see it as a sign that I have motivation to learn something new. If the baby had tried to touch the cat one time and then given up, choosing to lay there placidly and content, he wouldn’t have grown and developed as much. His frustration was a symptom of his development.
It’s easy to see how struggle causes humans to develop physically; I believe it must also help us develop mentally and emotionally. In addition to my struggles with yoga, I also struggle with my internal landscape, my judgements of myself, how to navigate difficult situations when I have to interact with someone who isn’t treating me properly. I get frustrated and tired and miss the red carpet experience. I like to remember that it’s ok to be frustrated and struggling, that it doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong (to compare it to the baby, he was doing something wrong in that his brain wasn’t firing the right signals to move to the cat, yet he was doing something right in that he was trying to get to the cat; I may be doing something wrong in a particular instance, yet it doesn’t mean the general trend of my life or the choices I’m making are wrong).
I continued to babysit that kid for years. His struggle to roll over turned into a struggle to walk. Rolling over became effortless. His struggle to walk later became the struggle to talk. He was always learning something new, which meant that there was always something he was trying to do that he wasn’t good at yet. I have done my best to follow that same path in life, always learning something new, always developing new skills. It means that struggle and frustration are a part of my life sometimes. That’s why I find struggle to be beautiful — it means I’m still growing.
