The Geography of an Easy Life
Everyone wants an easy life, but what does that even mean? Do you not want to work? Do you not want to struggle? It is both possible and impossible. An easy life is achievable, but you have to do the work to ease or remove obstacles; getting your ducks in a row, if you will. Think about the old lesson our parents tried to teach us, something as simple as setting out your clothes for school the night before. Do we still do it? NO! In fact, some of us wake up and realize we still need to do laundry! We hustle to find something clean or do a quick load if there's time. Did we have time for that? Absolutely not, and now the whole morning "schedule" has been thrown off. To make matters worse, this is the day when our dear friend, Murphy, wants to play. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And so we scramble and struggle and cry about our hard life.
It doesn't have to be so hard. In our lives, there's a flow. There is movement and progress like the flow of a river. Along the banks, you have rocks and grass and sand and shallows and tree roots and trash that has washed ashore and pillars or posts that hold up bridges and logs and sticks and all the obstacles that slow down the easy flow. This slower spot is called the gegenweg. In the center, though, is a faster moving current free of obstacles. This is called the thalweg. (Me: high-fiving my Geography professor.) That is the easy part of life.
As I float down my proverbial river of life, I observe what I like and don't like. I can see where the energy slows and pools, and where it picks up speed and excitement. "I hate doing this process at work. What can I do to make it easier so I can be done with it and get to the good part?" "I hate that it takes me so long to do the dishes. What can I do to make this more efficient?" "I hate that it takes me so long to find what I need. How can I improve the way this area is organized?" (Pro-Tip: read Confessions of an Organized Homemaker and Organizing from the Inside Out. Life-changing!)
When I was in college studying business management, we (briefly) talked about Time and Motion Studies. Oh my goodness, this subject tickled my brain! Time Study measures how long it takes an average worker to complete a task at a normal pace. Motion Study is designed to determine the best way to complete a repetitive job. This is where my brain thrives because of my acute awareness of what I like and don't like and my drive to change and adjust to live more in the flow. I don't mind mundane tasks like packing envelopes, for example, but if I see it as an obstacle between me and the good stuff, I'm going to either make it go faster or resent it for being an immovable impediment. So I start studying my motions and the time it takes to do the task. If I do all the address labels at once, I don't have to keep shifting gears and thinking and using unnecessary motions. If I lay out all the components, I can shove everything in the envelopes without spending valuable time thinking and going down the checklist for each and every one. Call me weird, but this is fun for me -- making processes run smoother and more efficiently. Why? Because I don't enjoy doing them and my sweet little brain found a way to 1) make it fun and 2) get it out of the way to make room for joy!
Those small obstacles become the things that slow us down making life hard and unenjoyable. The more we prepare for those known obstacles, the less obstructive they become and the more we can live the easy life in the thalweg.
To bring this more into real-life, high-stakes context, my husband and I got into a fight. A full-on blowout that resulted in him leaving the house in a fit of anger screaming to God and Universe that he will be contacting a divorce attorney. We had reached a point in our relationship where we're both coming apart at the seams due to our prolonged lack of boundary awareness. We lost connection with what makes us happy and fulfilled. We trudged on doing things we didn't enjoy because of "responsibilities." Of course, we both wanted an easy life, but neither of us had a clue about what that actually looked like.
It took time to heal. We cried together. We laughed together. We remembered what mattered most. We took time for ourselves to remember what mattered to us as individuals.
Slowly, we started identifying our obstacles - the things that drained us, the resentments that had built up, the "responsibilities" that were actually just rocks in our river making everything harder than it needed to be. We started asking different questions: not "how do we do more?" but "what can we let go of? What can we change? What actually matters?"
Life didn't suddenly become effortless. But we found more flow. We started living more in the thalweg - not because we eliminated every obstacle, but because we learned to recognize them, navigate around them, and sometimes just... let them go.
The easy life isn't about having no struggles. It's about not carrying obstacles you don't need to carry. It's about making conscious choices to spend your energy where it matters most. It's about finding your flow and protecting it fiercely.
