If It Were Easy, It Would Have No Value

If It Were Easy, It Would Have No Value

The sentence may not, in truth, be about things at all, but about the human being.

For we do not fully discover our own worth when life runs smoothly, without trial or hardship. We come to discover something of who we truly are when our choices become limited, answers are delayed, and doors we thought would remain open begin to close.

There are people whose strength we never knew until something in their lives broke.

We never knew the depth of their patience until the waiting grew long.

And we never knew the purity of their hearts until they had the power to strike back, yet chose forgiveness instead.

It is as though hardship does not always come to tell us, “I will stop you.”

Sometimes it comes to say, “I will show you who you are.”

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There is also a beautiful paradox hidden within the sentence:

We often wish for things to come easily, and then, when they do, we fail to recognize their worth.

We ask for health, sustenance, love, tranquility, and peace of mind… as though we wish to have them all without a price.

And yet, how many blessings do we recognize only after we have lost them!

A person may spend years walking on his own two feet without giving thanks for the blessing of walking, until one day he longs for nothing more than a single step.

He may be surrounded by his family, sometimes growing weary of their conversations and endless requests, only for absence to arrive and teach him that the noise which once troubled him was, in truth, the sound of life.

And here, the sentence takes on another meaning:

Not everything we grow accustomed to is of little value. Some of life’s greatest blessings lose their radiance in our eyes simply because they were never difficult to obtain.

And, in my view, this is one of the harshest truths concealed within the sentence.

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There is something else within the human soul.

Sometimes the difficulty is not in reaching something, but in letting it go.

A person may remain attached to a hope while knowing, deep within himself, that it is no longer meant for him, and yet he finds himself unable to release it.

So he assumes that the difficulty of letting go is proof of the value of what he is leaving behind.

But that is not always so.

Sometimes it is difficult because the heart has become attached—not because what it is attached to is truly worthy.

And here we should be careful not to misunderstand the wisdom:

Not everything that exhausts us is worth continuing to pursue.

The wisdom is not:

If it is difficult, hold on to it.

Perhaps it is rather this:

If it is precious, be patient with it; but if it is false or unworthy, do not mistake the difficulty of letting it go for proof of its value.

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And in the heart, there is a gentler meaning still.

There are things we cannot obtain, no matter how much we give, simply because they were never ours to have.

And here comes a stage of maturity that people rarely speak about:

Knowing when patience is a virtue, and when acceptance is a virtue.

Patience says:

I can still do something.

Acceptance says:

I have done what I can, and what remains is beyond my hands.

Somewhere between these two sentences, the soul grows.

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The mind, however, asks a more difficult question:

Is the value found in the difficulty of the journey, or in the destination we are striving to reach?

I believe the answer is:

In both—but in different proportions.

A noble destination gives meaning to hardship, while hardship reveals the sincerity with which we pursue that destination.

And so, some things may be easy to attain, yet that does not make them great.

Other things may be extraordinarily difficult to reach, yet in the end, they may not have been worth all the years we spent pursuing them.

What matters, then, is not the number of wounds we carry out of the journey, but what the destination was truly worthy of us sacrificing for it.

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Then there is a meaning I fear may be closest to the human heart toward the end of life:

After we have traveled great distances, the value is no longer found entirely in what we have reached.

It is also found in those we loved along the way.

In a hand that reached out to us when we stumbled.

In a word that remained with us for years.

In someone who asked nothing of us, yet remained present.

In a mother or father whose presence we did not fully appreciate until their presence became a memory.

In a homeland from which we may have been distant for decades, only to discover that some places never leave us, even when we leave them behind.

And in people we thought we had forgotten, until a small moment was enough to reveal that they had been living in a deeper place within us than we had ever imagined.

And here, the sentence becomes both painful and beautiful:

If everything had been easy, perhaps we would have arrived sooner… but perhaps we would not have become the people we were meant to become along the way.

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Perhaps the deepest place to which this little sentence can lead us is this:

Sometimes we look back upon our lives and count what we lost, what was delayed, and what never came to pass.

But perhaps the more meaningful question is:

What did all of those things make of me?

What did the years make of me?

What did loss make of me?

What did waiting make of me?

What did my mistakes make of me?

What did the doors that never opened make of me?

Perhaps life was never teaching us how to obtain everything we wanted.

Perhaps it was teaching us how to become capable of carrying what we receive—and how to live peacefully with what we do not receive.

And here, I believe, the little sentence reaches its fullest meaning:

If it were easy, it would have no value.

If everything were available to us, we would never learn the meaning of choice.

If we had never lost anything, we would never have known the value of what remained.

And if we had never grown weary along the way, we would never have come to know ourselves as we walked.

And then I fall silent for a while…

Because some meanings, once they reach the heart, should not be explained any further.

Perhaps the most beautiful thing about this short sentence is that it leaves us a space in which to place the things we have never said to anyone.