Choice

Choose always the way that seems the best, however rough it may be.  Custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.  Pythagoras


Interesting discussion last week when some one asked me if being with my daughter for 3 days while she went through labor was Hard or Good.  I was puzzled.  I have thought and thought, why would Hard and Good be considered opposites.  To me Hard is not equated with Bad.  I will say that Bad things can be Hard but so can Good things be Hard.  Watching my daughter hurt was not Good.  Watching grandson's mom and dad work together to bring him into the world was Good.  I need to approach this from one of my life goals to finish my college degree.  I started out 35 years ago studying engineering.  It combined my math skills with my desire to help others.  I dropped out of college my sophomore year and raised 6 beautiful amazing kids.  I joked that I became a home engineer with 6 on going projects and juggling all the different schedule dead lines.  As the kids got older, my old desire to finish school nagged at me.  The community college offered classes off campus close to where I lived.  My desire burned brighter.  I knew when I left college that my weakest class was English.  I still hadn't taken English 102.  I was terrified of having to write a research paper.  The ONE research paper I wrote in high school I was helped by my brother and his friend to get it typed and turned in.  Over the years the experience took on a surreal nightmare proportions of a monster.  I took the hardest class first.  English 102 was Hard.  The English teacher had high expectations.  After the first dismal papers handed in by the class, she chewed out the class and told the class that a research paper was not subjective.  She wrote out how to write a paper like a math formula.   Magical.  I can do math.  With the help of spell/grammar check (the moment in time when I fell in love with computers), family to edit and a lot of Hard work I passed the class with an A.  It was Hard and it was Good.  More than once during the semester I was ready to totally give up because it was so Hard.  However, it felt so Good to get it done.  I then continued to work on my degree for the next 15 years one class at a time.  I took a job at the local university so I could help pay for my kids education and take classes myself.  It was Hard juggling teenagers, work, cooking, and homework.  I sometimes wondered if this goal was truly worth all the work and struggles.  Then I was laid off.  I counted up how many classes I had left to take.  I finished in a year by taking summer school and online classes.  It was VERY HARD.  Walking across the stage behind my daughter-in-law who graduated with me, felt VERY GOOD.