Easy Life

Growing up, my parents always told me I would go to college. It was not even a discussion in my house. You graduated high school, and you went to college. That is just what you did. No questions asked. I went to college right after high school, the way I was always told I would. I attended school for two years, and I quit. I decided I did not like school, did not want to go to school, and I was wasting my time and money doing something I hated. I quit. What was I thinking? I now have a wife, a child, and a full time job, and I am back where I should have been all along. So many things have changed, and yet, so many things are the exact same. I am majoring in Pre-Physical Therapy with the goal of continuing on to get my Master’s from Missouri State, the same goals I had an eighteen-year-old fresh out of high school. So why did it take me so long to get here? Do I dare think of the time that has passed as wasted time? I have always heard that some people need to learn things the hard way, and while I knew I never did anything the easy way, I always thought that saying was ridiculous. Why would people want to learn things the hard way? If you knew that you always did things the hard way, then would you not change that about yourself? Would you not purposefully look for different ways than your normal to approach a situation? I guess not because the one thing I have learned about myself is that I must do things the hard way. It would have been easy to wait and marry my wife once we both finished college. It would have been easy to wait and have my son after I finished my college degree. It would have been easy to go to school when I was still just working part time instead of fifty hour weeks. It would have been easy to go to school when I was living with parents and not worrying about a mortgage. However, when I was young, I had a baseball coach who told me that nothing worthwhile was ever easy. There are moments in my life when I think about all that I could have done that would have been easier. It is easy to get wrapped up in those moments when you realize you have made life more difficult on yourself. Those moments can swallow you, consume your thoughts, make you doubt your every move. Yet, when I try to imagine my life without my wife, without my son, without my job, without my house; I realize that I would not have a life. I would have a lot of easy moments that combined to create a mundane existence. My life may not have been easy, but it has definitely been worthwhile, and I would take a worthwhile life over an easy life anyday.