Just Two Things

Just Two Things

by Kathleen Smith

There are only two things in this old world: Easy and Hard. That's right, just two things. Now, I've been around the block at least once, and that's how I see it. Take a peach tree for instance. I can let someone grow it, and that's easy, I can let another someone pick it and that's real easy. I can wait for somebody with more time that me to cut it and sugar it and cook it, and that super easy. Then, I can go to the store on a Saturday night and buy that peach, all grown and picked and cut and cooked and packaged for me and that's easiest of all! Wow, I win the prize for easiest.

Then, there's hard. Oh, it's hard to go to the nursery and choose a peach tree. It's even harder to get out on a cold spring morning and plant the thing. Then, it's as hard as it can be just to water that beast every week and keep it alive through the frost and the birds and the dogs. It's harder still to keep the bugs off, and finally after years of nurturing go out and pick the fruit. Preserving, eating, storing and using that fruit is so amazingly hard that it sometimes doesn't even get done.

Do you see what I mean? There are just two things. But wait a minute. I think I may have gotten these two things mixed up! See, that first easy thing, letting someone else do all the work and going to the store to buy it, that's easy at the first, but let's keep going here. We just went to the store and bought what? A picked, pared, pre-packaged, preserved piece of peach, packed in pre-processed, protein-free pulp. Right, so I choke it down, if I can, and then the fun begins. My body, the innocent by-stander here, takes a look at this non-food item in the stomach and says, “Hmm, what could this be? It isn't a peach, really, so it must be an impostor! Hah, we won't let you get away with this. We know what to do with fake food.” The body then sends out an alarm, and the allergic responses kick in. Sneezing, swelling and other symptoms occur, and as a result, we dump in expensive, state-of-the-art allergy medicine. That's hard. But the medicine, like any good bureaucrat, stops all useful activity in resisting the non-food items and simply tells it that everything is fine. That is extremely hard, on the body. Thus, the body is demobilized, desensitized and generally anesthetized until it accepts any and all foreign substances put into the body. The result of course is not health but the opposite. We eat whatever we want and take whatever we have to take to make the body accept it. That is hardest of all.

But what about that hard thing? After getting over the initial hard part of waiting and watering, the fruits of your labor are abundant for many years to come. Year after year, the tree will bear fruit. The more care you give it, the better the fruit. You can pick the fruit without spending any of your hard-earned money, that's easy. You can eat it right from the tree and enjoy the fresh and delicious flavor so rarely found anywhere else. That's wonderfully easy. Then, thanks to the excellent, unadulterated amino-acid and vitamin content of the fruit, your body thrives and is healthy and vital for years to come. That is easy.

So, now, I'm looking for hard things to do because I know that some of those hard things are really easy, and some of those easy things are really, really hard.