I will offer a dictum: the only path to lasting comfort is through discomfort.
Much of life, I think, consists in pushing, then letting go. Pushing, then letting go.,
What hard work does is make easy work seem easy. And how we define hard and easy depends strongly on what we are used to.
So if you want an easy day, line yourself up a lot of hard days, then contrast them. And the harder your hard days, the harder your easy days, objectively.
The point of self discipline is to learn to tolerate easily the vicissitudes of life. You know some shit is going to go down. You just don’t know what or where or when. So you prepare yourself by not being weak. And you become strong by learning to be comfortable in harder and harder situations. To use a cliche, to become comfortable in discomfort.
People from truly poor countries, coming here, are I think reliably astonished at how much we take for granted, and how lazy we all are. We don’t even have to walk a mile there and back for well water every morning. And we have stoves that heat up at the touch of a button. Luxury. All luxuries.
So much of what I might call preparatory spiritual work consists in raising the baseline of the amount of work and effort comes out of us spontaneously.
That was the other point I wanted to make: at a certain point, work stops being work It becomes play, when we can do something well and spontaneously. The task is to raise the level at which you can still play, and not feel yourself fighting. This is the level of the will. You want to avoid needing will power as much as possible, because it is perishable. Play, on the other hand, can last a very long time indeed.
That was almost what I wanted to say. I tend to think in, I’m not sure how to describe it, forms with textures and colors. If you were psychic, I could show you.