I keep returning to this bit of an interview with Greg McKeown on Gretchen Rubin’s blog, which is a good sign that I should take note of it here. He talks about how, in the case of a health scare with his daughter, he was confronted with a decision:
All we wanted in the world was for Eve to get better. That wasn’t just the most important thing. It was the only thing. What came into view for me was two paths for getting there. One made this challenging situation heavier. The other made this challenging situation lighter. And we had to choose which path to take. Maybe this choice seems obvious. But it wasn’t. As parents, our instinct was to attack the problem, with full force, from all directions: worrying about her 24/7, reaching out to every neurologist in the country, meeting with doctors one after the other, asking them a million questions, pulling all-nighters poring over medical journals and googling for a cure or even just a diagnosis, researching alternative medicine as a possible option. What the gravity of the situation called for, we assumed, was near-superhuman effort. But such an approach would have been unsustainable, while also producing disappointing results.
Mercifully, we took the second path. We realized that the best way to help our daughter, and our whole family, through this time was not by exerting more effort. In fact, it was quite the opposite. We needed to find ways to make every day a little easier. Why? Because we needed to be able to sustain this effort for an unknown length of time. It was not negotiable: we simply could not now or ever burn out. If your job is to keep the fires burning for an indefinite period of time, you can’t throw all the fuel on the flames at the beginning.
[His daughter, he notes, is almost completely better now.]
What did I learn from this experience? Whatever has happened to you in life. Whatever hardship. Whatever pain. However significant those things are. They pale in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now. You can make the choice to continue to work harder and harder, wearing yourself out in the process. Or, you can choose a more effortless path. One where you try and make each day a little easier.
Reading this, it might be easy to think that the decision to go “easier” is a selfish one. Isn’t there merit in sacrificing for someone? Doesn’t the Bible say, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”? I think there’s an interesting nuance here. Taking the first path could be falling into an illusion, or perhaps a misunderstanding of love. Because the appearance of total dedication, the self-imposed sacrifice is a distraction from what is even more important: a recognition (and acceptance) of vulnerability.