Becoming a Fan of Struggle

I ran 33 miles this week.

There was a time, only a few short years ago, that 50 to 60 miles a week was normal for me. Day after day, I could step out my front door and crank out 10 miles before work.

That changed when I went for a 7-mile run on a business trip that ended in the emergency room of a hospital 2,500 miles from home.

It took months of rehabilitation to get back to full running strength. During that time, I gained about 30 pounds because I’m rarely careful about what I eat. “I eat, therefore I run,” has been my mantra for more than 15 years.

I’ve run with the same group of guys for almost 10 years. Together, we’ve learned and trained to do some hard things.

I love the guys I run with which has made the struggle a lot more enjoyable. But, I’ve learned to love the struggle of a long run enough that I’ll often run alone with just my thoughts. Running is where I do some of my best thinking.

There are, of course, far more areas in my life where I don’t love the struggle. As I inferred before, I’ve struggled to control what I eat. Because of the amount of running I do, I’m in fairly good shape, but running would be easier if I weighed 20 pounds less.

A struggle is a forceful effort to get free of restraint or constriction. In order to effect change in your life, you have to become friends with struggle which is just another way of saying getting comfortable in discomfort. Even when the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same, change is hard. Change often requires not doing some of the things that you felt were essential to your identity.

For example, if weekends were about going to bars with your friends, and you’re now giving up alcohol, it is, in a very real sense, like having a part of you die; a social identity dies and has to be reborn as something else. The space between death and rebirth is where you can develop a good relationship with doing hard things.

In order to find joy in the journey, though, you have to embrace the mentality that you can do hard things and thrive while doing them.

Of course, there are varying degrees of hard things, some of which are so hard that thriving is almost impossible. If you’ve ever watched someone struggle through a horrible illness for a prolonged period of time (or had to struggle through it yourself) you understand something of doing hard things and just surviving.

There are also hard things that you can make a lot harder simply by hanging onto a defeatist mentality. If you are otherwise healthy, but have a can’t do attitude, training for a 5k will be a lot more difficult than it would otherwise be.

How do you become a fan of the struggle?

In order to thrive in difficulty, you have to possess the kind of attitude that allows you to grow in adversity. For you, this might be trying to express gratitude daily in spite of the difficulty. It might look like serving others in your extremity.

The attitude isn’t, however, one of sitting around bemoaning your own fate; resigning yourself to the control of the universe. As the old saying goes, there’s no situation in life that can’t be made worse by complaining about it.

Of course, you also can’t succeed by being inauthentic. Sometimes, the struggle will just suck. Sometimes, you’re going to have bad days; you’re going to ugly cry, scream into the void, and want to give up.

It’s important not to run from reality. Sometimes your best self is the person who shows up broken and vulnerable. When days are hard, don’t pretend like they’re not.

Attitude and authenticity move you toward a better relationship with difficulty but only when properly balanced. Too much of either one leads to trouble in your fledgling relationship with struggle.

The third step is embracing the difficulty. This is about acceptance. Soon or late, difficulties will come into all of our lives. To steal a quote from Rafiki in the original animated Lion King:

The way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it.

There’s no way to outrun difficulty. Going back to the running, even world-class runners have off days where running a 5k is mentally or physically taxing for them.

Rafiki did leave out a third option: giving up without trying. Not a great option, but it is one that some people choose.

Whatever option you go with here, give yourself grace. You don’t always know how you’ll respond when in the thick of a battle you’ve never been in before.

Last, I believe there are lessons you can always learn from difficulty. However, struggles are often deeply personal. Nobody can tell you what lessons you should learn from your struggles. You can, of course, invite people in to help you consider the lessons, but it is up to you to decide. You might find some great significance in an extreme trial or you may conclude that the experience was just horrible and belongs in a chapter of your life you never revisit.

Remember, though, some of the most beautiful experiences and lessons of life come from the adversities we overcome.