Life Gets Easy

Said the coal to the diamond, "Why so hard?" Said the diamond to the coal, "Why so soft? Life is hard. Be hard!" (paraphrase of The Hammer Speaks story) -- Nietzsche.

Recently life, my life, has gotten easy, not hard.  Let me explain.

For the last three years I have participated in the local Y's sprint triathlon.  "Sprint" means "short," but still 1.5 to 1.75 hours of intense aerobic exercise is pain-inducing.  One of my motivations for doing this was to see how I compare to my peers, and I learned not too well.  Here are my peer group results:

• 2012: 4 of 6
• 2013: 6 of 7
• 2014: 9 of 9

I swore that I would not participate this year but they introduced a new event called Aquabike (500 m swim, 20 km bike, no run).  My time was okay -- 1 hour and 16 minutes.  And I won my age bracket (full disclosure: I was the only one in my age bracket).  Life gets easy.

Here's another example.  I always wanted to teach a calculus course.  Why? Because I never really learned calculus (it's a long story) and I know that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it.  Well I do teach MAT135 Business Pre-calculus and maybe someday the school will schedule me to teach MAT136 Business Calculus.  In any case, these courses are not hard.  Life gets easy.

So maybe Nietzsche is wrong.  Life is not hard.  At least not all of the time.