Taking the easier option

A few days back I watched the Hindi movie “Dear Zindagi”, the Shah Rukh Khan & Alia Bhatt starrer. I watched it with undivided attention, which is a first for me, since being a mom implicitly implies that I cannot do a lot of things with undivided attention, watching movies being one of them. That movie had so much to teach, I guess many movies have lessons, but I have been too multi tasked to notice them. Since I had nothing to do for 11 hours, boxed in an aircraft, I actually listened to every dialogue in Dear Zindagi. There is an exchange in the movie where SRK tells Alia that many times we choose the tough way because we think that the road to our dreams would be hard and we do not choose the easy way just because it is easy.
This set me thinking, so much so that I paused the movie to just….well pause….and ponder. We are all so mentally conditioned from childhood to opt for the more difficult option just because it is more difficult, or rather perceived as more difficult. Remember the literature classes? Paraphrase- “Life is not a bed of roses” and we wrote pages and pages on it. We romanticised on conquering this mountain called life and presented ourselves the victory trophy.
We have pooh poohed the easy stuff, as though it is just not worth considering. Coming back to our childhood and our conditioning- Engineering-tough, humanities-easy! In the scale of hard to easy, we have placed subjects and spent our time and energy to go for the tougher choices. In the school I studied in, in the 8th standard we were given a choice of subjects- History, Geography, Advanced Maths. A lot of students opted for Advanced Maths not because they were Maths whiz kids, but because Advanced Maths was deemed tougher than History or Geography. Whether it was or is tougher is a matter of debate which I do not wish to enter into now. I have witnessed the struggle of the maths fearers as they went through stress and toil, just to remain afloat. And I have witnessed their shame when they were asked to quit Advanced Maths and move to History or Geography! A chunk of childhood which would have been otherwise happy was lost to misery over Advanced Maths!
We have learnt that if we want something that is worthwhile we need to push the envelope, move out of our comfort zones, take on more workload, step up to challenges, do the tough thing. But is the tough way the best way? Oftentimes we take the tough way and realise that the journey has turned so bitter that the joy of achieving what we achieve, if we ever do achieve it, does not give us the sense of elation and pride we had earlier envisaged. Choosing the hard way is not always the best way- we might be stressing ourselves, stressing others and also not obtaining the desired outcome.
Also, hard or easy is a completely personal thing- what is hard for one person might be very smooth easy for another. A child with dyslexia might be a maths wizard and a child with dyscalculia might be a great writer. It is so important to know our capabilities and our limitations- not merely intellectual but also psychological and emotional before we make a choice of the path we traverse. The hard way might have been glamourised by the legends of time, but if the way we choose does not accentuate and make use of our strengths we will just burn out!
Choosing the easy way when life presents us with a situation, to use Robert Frost’s words, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—”, is not shameful. Choosing the easy path may save us the stress, the struggle and the hassle and also make the journey through this path a beautiful and enriching experience.