When The Hardest Thing & The Right Thing Are the Same

[This essay was originally sent as part of our “Words for Your Wednesday” weekly email series. If you’d like to get reads like this one sent straight to your inbox, you can join the Windrose email community here.]

“Nuh uh!” I had protested.

The best thing about being 15 years old is that you know absolutely everything there is to know about life.

I certainly did.

I was arguing with my friends over the line in a song from The Fray (#tbt to moody middle school days): “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

Doing the right thing should never be hard, I confidently claimed. Anytime you have the choice to do the right thing, the healthy thing, the thing that builds up rather than tears down, it should never, ever be difficult to choose that.

Like I said, I knew everything.

Of course, 13 years later, I know that I don’t actually know much at all. And I also know that the hardest thing and the right thing are just about ALWAYS the same. It’s madness, really.

Think about it… how many instances can you think of when the right decision—the decision that offers life-giving goodness to your community, to the earth, to you—is easy?

You know what’s easy?

Prepping a box of powdery mac ‘n cheese instead of opening a cookbook to make something that somewhat resembles the FDA Food Pyramid. Sitting on my couch with a box of Trader Joe’s mochi and Real Housewives of New Jersey instead of scribbling a few words in a letter to a friend to let them know—within the timeline discretion of the U.S. Postal Service—that I am thinking of them. To scroll through Instagram instead of doing anything else.

Those things are easy.

Doesn’t make ‘em the sort of choices that offer life-giving goodness to my community, to earth, to me.

Yet, to the shock of all-righteous 15-year old me, I choose the easy option just about always. Turns out the right thing is hard, after all.

(Of course, I know there are exceptions to this. A warm bath is usually the right remedy to chill out my frazzled brain, and it is a very easy choice for me to make.)

My friend recently had to make a hard decision, the kind that The Fray guys probably had in mind when they penned that particular line in the early 00s.

The kind of decision that you know is right in the long run, but that still requires sad Taylor Swift songs and an agreeable amount of introspection as a result. Maybe even a dash of “woe is me!” thrown in for a more complex flavor profile. (Okay, confession, that’s just how I tend to react to hard decisions, no matter how right they might be.)

“Why can’t doing the hard thing be EASY?” I want to rage, with a good fist shake for theatrical measure.

I wonder if doing the right thing is so difficult because it’s a lot like propagating a succulent. You won’t see the new growth—the splaying, erratic roots of new life—for a hella long time.

Eating my veggies and working out my bod are all hard decisions for me. I just don’t wanna, ma! They also happen to be decisions that I won’t see instant results from. You have to, God forbid, WAIT for the outcome.

And if you’re anything like me, you’re a tap-your-foot, watch-the-clock kind of waiter.

Microwaves and the World Wide Web might be the worst thing to ever happen to humans as far as conditioning us to go with the instant gratification option (read: the easier, Mac n Cheese choice) rather than the hard, yet right, decision.

But if the hardest thing and the right thing are indeed the same, what’s a person to do? Especially a gal like me who prefers the easy way out, please and thanks.

For starters, we don’t do as 15-year-old Ally did and declare with the all-knowing experience of someone who has been alive for a mere 1.5 decades that doing the right thing is ALWAYS EASY, rawr!

No, we acknowledge that, sometimes, the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.

And then we let ourselves be needy.

We choose the hardest thing, the right thing, but we don’t do it alone. We ask for help. We make a cheese board; we invite our people into the muck of our difficulties.

Then we wait, eyes open for the propagating roots of new growth that come from choosing the hardest thing, the right thing.

But we don’t wait alone.

And that, to me, makes doing the hard thing, the right thing, just a little bit easier.

[Cover image by Derick McKinney on Unsplash]

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