The Effort We Choose
I have been thinking about effort.
There is an appealing idea that a good life is a life in which things become easier.
We work so that eventually we will not have to work so hard. We solve problems so that eventually there will be fewer problems. We organize, save, learn, improve.
Somewhere behind all of this there may be a quiet picture of the destination: a life with very little resistance.
I am no longer sure that would be a good life.
I recently listened to a lecture by Professor Valery Petukhov about the nature of life. One of the ideas that stayed with me was that life cannot really be separated from activity, effort, movement, striving.
It made me think about something I have noticed in my own days.
There are days when I do a great deal and still feel strangely dissatisfied.
Calls. Messages. Problems. Bills. Driving. Arrangements. Things that needed to be fixed.
There was certainly effort.
But almost all of it was demanded by something outside me.
Reality presented something, and I responded.
Then there are other days when I may accomplish considerably less, but the day feels different.
I read ten pages of a difficult book.
I carry a kettlebell across the garage.
I work on something with my hands.
I stay with a question instead of reaching for my phone.
I have a difficult conversation and try to remain curious instead of immediately solving it.
None of these things are particularly impressive.
But there is something different about the effort.
I chose it.
Perhaps this is an important distinction.
There is effort that life extracts from us.
And there is effort that we offer voluntarily.
The first keeps life functioning.
The second may be part of what makes us feel alive.
This does not mean that we should manufacture hardship. There is already enough difficulty in life without deliberately creating more.
Nor does it mean that every day needs a goal, a project, or another program of self-improvement.
I have spent enough time thinking that way.
Effort is not the same thing as productivity.
Reading carefully requires effort.
Learning to do something with your hands requires effort.
Listening when you would rather explain requires effort.
Not picking up the phone requires effort.
Remaining with uncertainty requires effort.
Sometimes doing nothing for a while, without escaping from yourself, requires effort too.
What seems to matter is that there is some place where I meet reality voluntarily.
Something that asks something of me, and I choose to answer.
I can see this in many of the books that have stayed with me.
Robinson Crusoe does not become more capable by thinking about capability. Reality gives him resistance, and he works against it.
Humphrey Van Weyden in The Sea-Wolf discovers that ideas alone are insufficient. Circumstances require him to acquire capacities he did not previously have.
Perhaps that is one of the ways a person changes.
Resistance creates the occasion for effort.
Effort becomes experience.
Experience slowly becomes understanding.
Understanding can become capability.
And capability, over time, may become self-command.
I did not design those stages as a theory of life. I simply keep noticing them.
They are also the four rings I eventually placed around Create What Lasts:
Experience → Understanding → Capability → Self-command.
Maybe effort is what moves us from one ring to the next.
Not constant struggle.
Not suffering for its own sake.
Not endless optimization.
Just the willingness to engage with something that has weight.
This also changes the question I might ask at the end of a day.
For a long time the natural question was:
What did I get done today?
I am beginning to think there may be another question worth asking:
Where was my own chosen effort today?
I don't know whether every day needs an answer.
But I suspect the days that feel most alive usually have one.