The number of times I’ve cried (or almost cried) on a hike is more than I care to admit.
Not a graceful, moved-by-nature cry. A full, exhausted, this-was-a-terrible-idea cry. Hot, depleted, out of water, being absolutely swarmed by bugs, wondering why I thought this was a good plan and daydreaming of just laying down and never moving again. Flare a helicopter to come and get me.
And then we got to the campsite. Alpine lake. Still water. Quiet and beauty that a fraction of the population ever gets to experience.
I remember sitting there thinking: that was one of the hardest days of my life. And yet, I felt some wild kind of accomplishment in myself. A pride that you can’t explain that you somehow did it.
That feeling doesn’t come from easy.
The things that matter most are rarely easy
Think about the relationships that have shaped you most. The work you’re most proud of. The moments where you felt most alive.
Most of them involved difficulty at some point. A hard conversation you finally had. A failure you pushed through. Something that scared you and you did anyway.
That’s not a coincidence.
There’s something that happens when we do hard things. Not just the result, but the experience of doing them. The quiet confidence that comes from knowing you can handle more than you thought.
You don’t get that from easy.
We’ve started to confuse comfort with wellbeing
There’s nothing wrong with wanting comfort. But comfort and wellbeing aren’t the same thing.
Wellbeing comes from engagement. From meaning. From the feeling that your life requires something of you and that you’re meeting it.
When everything is optimised for ease, life can start to feel oddly flat. When nothing is asking anything of you, life is meaningless.
Humans need to be asked something of.
Hard conversations are where intimacy actually lives
One of the clearest examples of this is in relationships.
The couples I work with who have the strongest connections aren’t the ones who never fight or never feel uncomfortable. They’re the ones who have learned to say the hard thing. To come back after an argument and actually talk about what happened. To choose honesty over the easier silence.
That’s not easy. But it’s where intimacy lives.
Avoiding hard conversations doesn’t protect a relationship. It quietly hollows it out. Two people becoming polite strangers who never quite say what they mean.
The relationship that requires something of you is the one that actually grows.
Failure is part of the process, not a sign to stop
We’ve also developed a complicated relationship with failure.
Something goes wrong and the instinct is to interpret it as a signal. That we’re on the wrong path. That we’re not cut out for it. That we should find something easier.
But failure is just information. And often it’s the most useful kind.
There have been days in business where I’ve wanted to walk away from everything. And what I’ve learned is this: if you wouldn’t quit on your best day, don’t quit on your worst. The days that felt the hardest are the ones I’m most grateful I stayed for. That’s when I learned the most.
The people I’ve seen grow the most, in therapy and in life, are rarely the ones who had it easy. They’re the ones who kept going when it was hard, who sat with it long enough to learn something from it.
You can’t shortcut that process. Trying to usually just delays it.
A gentle question
This isn’t an argument for making life unnecessarily difficult, or for pushing through things that genuinely need to stop.
It’s just worth asking, when you find yourself avoiding something because it’s hard: is the avoidance actually serving you?
Because sometimes the hard thing is exactly where the good stuff is.
And the alpine lake at the end is usually worth the bugs.