Nothing good was ever easy. The expression is much older than I am. I did not have the patience or desire to look up its origins. Not that words can be attributed to any one person. Everyone has thought of everything there is to think. Some forget what they think of, most ignore it, few record it. I was among the few. Yet, it does not make these words mine. Everyone before me has thought of these same things—over and over again. It is disheartening when you think of an idea—it appears before your eyes in a flash of inspiration—and you find how someone has said it before. Does it make it any less your own? Was any of it yours to begin with? Ideas belonged to no one and everyone at the same time.
It was also about how we perceived ideas. No amount of inspiration ever gave someone an ounce of patience to sit with their thoughts. Patience was cultivated, quite like the garden most people try to grow at some point in their yard before realising it is easier to get vegetables at the store, hanging up the tools in their shed. Few find the patience to deal with the failure and persist. Once the garden burgeons, the entire family enjoys vegetables with little to no effort for years to come. A person who thinks of a clever concept on a bus ride to a bustling workplace often forgets the novel thought amidst the papers, graphs, and meetings. I had lost a plethora of ideas this way—even when I had noted them down.
Nothing good was ever easy, but people thought easy and simple were the same. Often, when we lack the patience to truly understand what words meant, which is a quality in dearth in my time, we assigned more meaning than intended. When they read the words, they often read them as: nothing good was ever simple. It was the most common error. It was an error with radical ramifications to how their attempt towards anything good panned out. Everything good was ever so simple. Missing this distinction, we often spent our lives in a convoluted mess of misunderstanding, complicated events that scarred us over and over in the same places, as we continually, almost obsessively chanted: nothing good was ever easy.
Most love was lost this way; most lives, too.