Muscle fibers and tendons can tear during training.
Bones can fracture and break during the execution.
Brain cells can fire white-hot through the effort.
The thing about things that break, is the fact that if the organism survives, the organism has the opportunity to strengthen and improve.
Muscle fibers and tendons strengthen after periods of rest and careful maintenance.
Bones repair and harden where they were broken if they're looked after.
Brain cells and neural pathways re-wire and strengthen bonds during periods of rest and rejuvenation.
But it's not just our biology that can fracture. Social, political, and economic bonds and structures can fracture. The bonds that rend themselves under the weight of our egos, our inability to empathize or see each other from a position of vulnerability and openness.
Our inability to empathize in some way with the lives of rural communities when we live in relative comfort and privilege of urban life. Conversely, the inability of rural communities to empathize with the continuing plight of urban lives who labor under pressures they can neither control nor comprehend.
Without doing the emotional and spiritual labor of trying to lift the proverbial weight of empathy, without causing some rifts and fractures of our own, this kind of strength will elude us indefinitely.
As political, social, and economic forces endeavor to stratify and drive us further apart from one another. As our bonds continue to strain well beyond their breaking points. Our ability to understand that without stress or repairable fractures, without friction or frisson, we do not strengthen, change, or evolve depends upon us engaging in the everyday labor.
A life without labors, tears, friction, fractures, or exertion is a life that cannot and will not ever become something more.
The cost isn't always paid in terms of monetary exchange. It's more likely you gave something up for free or shifted the cost to someone else.
When you allow someone to "buy" your consent, ignorance, ethics, blindness, or silence for a product, a political maneuver, or social issue, are you really getting what you expected from the exchange? What about the non-white, non-Christian, non-binary people proverbially adjacent to you? Or how about that sweat-shop factory on the other side of the planet? Or that family member that looks up to you and loves you dearly?
Sometimes cost isn't measured in money. Sometimes there's an indirect social or political cost.
Are you weighing the costs?
It's not a question that's supposed to be superficial or easy to answer. "A cheeseburger" isn't the kind of answer that this kind of question, when asked with gravitas and vulnerability, that whole-hearted people are looking for.
It's not supposed to be easy to answer. Difficult, yes –– but not impossible.
We all have agency, something too many of us lose sight of. The ability to make decisions in line with our highest ideals and our deepest desires.
Put on their pants just like everyone else.
Have to stretch, train, learn, practice, and fail like everyone else.
Wear protective gear and take safety precautions like everyone else.
Speak and listen to others as they'd want to be spoken and listened to (like everyone else).
There aren't any secrets. Humility and intelligence are essential.
But what's missing is you. You have to work hard. Just like everyone else.