Choose to make things difficult

Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.
– Aeschylus

Do you ever choose to make things more difficult than they need to be? Sometimes it seems like if there is an easy way and a hard way to do something, I choose the hard way. In English we sometimes say you are making a mountain out of a mole hill. The Portuguese equivalent is to make it a bug with seven heads. Often times I make something so hard in my head that I have a hard time even starting. When I do choose to start though I discover that it really wasn’t that hard and once I got going then I was able to finish.

Other times I am smart enough to choose the easy way. I’m not a big fan of hand sewing, so unless I feel it is essential to the design to have a biased binding, I “flip” my quilts to finish them. Then I only have to hand sew the hole I flipped it through rather than sew around the entire quilt. I put ruffles or cording on quilts for this exact reason – the finished look without the hand sewn finish.

I’ve seen people choose to do difficult things not realizing it was difficult. I have not yet done curved seams on my quilts because I understand what it means to line up curves from my other sewing. However I’ve seen people choose the drunkard path block for their first block and not find out till they’re all done that it was supposed to be hard. Our preconceptions can certainly influence our success.

Recently I was in a discussion where the concept being discussed was a simple concept, easily defined. Yet most of those discussing it seemed really uncomfortable with it being that simple. They had to keep adding on appendages to the definition, to make it more difficult.

I wonder if sometimes we choose to make things difficult so we have an excuse when we fail. It was just too hard.