I read Penelope Trunk’s blog. She has a huge following and makes big money writing. She’s interesting. And that’s the key. I look at her as a mentor, though we’ve never met. I emailed her a question once, she answered. Today in her post, one of her headings hit me:  “Life is easier if you embrace hardship instead of trying to avoid it.”

She was talking about careers and how when she stopped trying to make money and instead focused on doing interesting things, her career took off. Most of the time large companies seek safe moves, and avoid taking risks, even when they need innovation.

I understand wanting to avoid hardship, especially when you’ve been trudging along in the ditch for a long time. Give me the easy way. At least, give me that plateau for awhile.

My husband gets an A+ for embracing hardship, and choosing the interesting, innovative, difficult career. He is an optimist, and studies show that optimists are better at managing stress and are healthier. I don’t want to grade myself on his career choice.

I’m not a Gen Y, I’m really from that generation that was just trying to escape from the housewife title. I got my degree, had kids and  began a career of mothering full time. See, I embraced hardship, because pregnancy was barfing, and five kids was a career. And I think most moms will agree, we embrace it.

Life is easier when you embrace hardship, because that implies loving it. Why else embrace? But why should I love hardship?

President Eyring said  take the hard path. When he was young and complained that things were hard, his mother advised him, “If you are on the right path, it will always be uphill.” Bruce McConkie advised his children — choose the hard path. Joseph Smith said, “I am a rough stone rolling.” And now Penelope says, embrace hardship, life is easier.

But the key here is embrace. We do not embrace or hug what we hate. We embrace what we love. Love the uphill battle.

Even if you haven’t chosen a hard path, you find yourself in a hard path. Almost everyone finds themselves in some sort of hard path. But we can choose to embrace it as we’re slugging along.

Hardship = happiness only if you learn to embrace it. Only if you understand that through hardship, you are not alone, that you are becoming a better person, that “easy” is boring and gets you no where.

I want to progress. I recognize that I need something to progress from. I guess its that same old story, we must partake of the tree of knowledge — we can’t have one without the other. You can’t climb a ladder without starting at the bottom. Higher ground requires a hike.

I have hardships, so I’m going to embrace it, because it’s the higher path and when I get to the higher ground I will look around and find others like me and I’ll be glad that I did it — but I have to remember to embrace it everyday. Because I can murmur like other great women, like Sarah and Sariah. (Can’t a woman gripe a little now and then?)  When my son said I was a bit of a complainer, I complained, “wait until you have kids, careers go amuck, and you get to be my age, life is hard.”  But he’s right about one thing, I don’t need to complain.

I can embrace hardship. In a weird sort of way, it makes life easier.