As I grow older, I find myself more and more in control of the changes happening in my life. With control of these changes comes the responsibility of making the right choices, and I often find myself faced with situations that require me to determine the better choice from the easier choice. While there are certainly many choices where the easier choice is the better choice, by no means do changes that make my life easier always make my life better.
My first experience of this lesson was two years ago when I first gained responsibility of choosing which courses I wished to study at school. Three weeks into a Latin course, I found myself struggling with homework and leaving every lesson feeling as if my brain were about to shut down. I was then faced with the decision to drop the course and make my life much easier, and this was exactly what I did. I soon found myself in a much less challenging course, and at first it appeared to be a great change in my life; it both relieved me of stress and freed up more spare time for me. However at the end of the course I felt unsatisfied and bored, watching with envy as the Latin students rejoiced at the satisfaction of such a challenging yet rewarding course, and it was then that it dawned on me that easier is not always better.
Having learnt from this experience, I applied the same lesson to my other studies and found results immediately. The night before my final History exam, my friends invited me to go to the cinema with them in order to relax from all the stress of exams. This, of course, greatly appealed to me. However I thought about the implications of choosing to go to the cinema and make my life easier, and came to the conclusion that, in this case, easy was not better. Sure enough, upon receiving back our exam scores, the mumbles and groans spread across the classroom amongst my friends who had taken the night off. Due to my decision, I was relieved of this misery and found myself with an excellent score.
While the option that makes your life easier is always the most appealing one, it is not necessarily the option that makes your life better. The easier something is, the less work one must put into it, and as the saying goes "the harder one works, the luckier they become".
