Many years ago, I read The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck.
The first line in that book is particularly famous:
“Life is difficult… and once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.”
It is a powerful statement, and one I have thought about many times since.
I have also come to see another dimension to it.
Life can feel difficult, not simply because of our circumstances, but because of how we feel about them.
Think about your own experience.
When you are in good feelings, doesn’t your thinking tend to be more flexible, creative, and optimistic?
Problems are still there, but they don’t seem to weigh on you quite so heavily. You have perspective. You trust yourself to deal with things.
Yet when you’re in a low mood, those very same circumstances can feel completely different.
What changed?
Often, nothing outside of us.
Our state of mind changed.
The problem isn’t having low moods
Low moods are a perfectly normal part of being human.
I’ve never met anyone who only ever feels good. Have you?
Yet we seem to have developed a strange relationship with uncomfortable feelings.
We think we shouldn’t have them.
So, we end up analysing them, trying to fix them, or distracting ourselves.
Sometimes we even become anxious about feeling anxious, or frustrated because we feel frustrated.
In other words, we add another layer of thinking to an experience that was already uncomfortable.
Why do we do this?
Because of an idea.
The idea that we should be feeling differently to how we are.
Culturally, we’re continually sold the idea that happiness is something we should feel pretty much all the time and that, if we’re not experiencing it, something must be wrong.
But when we resist what we’re experiencing, we’re effectively picking a fight with reality.
As Byron Katie famously put it:
“When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.”
Suffering doesn’t come from feeling low. It comes from believing that feeling low is a problem.
You can have a low mood without it having you
One of the most helpful things I’ve learned is that you can have low moods without low moods having you.
If you think about the weather, it changes all the time doesn’t it? A storm doesn’t need any help to pass. You don’t have to push the clouds away or make the wind stop blowing.
Our inner experience has this quality too.
Thoughts and feelings are energy in motion. Left alone, they move, change, and eventually give way to something else.
Have you ever gone to bed worried about something that seemed incredibly important, only to wake up the following morning and see it differently?
The problem may not have changed at all.
But you have.
Your thinking has settled, your perspective has returned and what looked overwhelming at 11pm can look perfectly manageable at 8am.
This is why trying to solve problems from a low state of mind is rarely helpful. We are trying to fix the world when what really needs to change is the lens through which we’re looking.
And fortunately, the lens changes naturally.
What if nothing has gone wrong?
This raises an interesting possibility.
What if you didn’t believe everything your thinking was telling you in that moment?
Instead, what if you recognised that you’re simply experiencing some temporary psychological weather and allowed it to pass?
This isn’t about becoming passive or pretending that genuine problems don’t exist.
Difficult circumstances sometimes require difficult decisions, courageous conversations and practical action.
But there is a world of difference between responding to those circumstances from a clear mind and reacting to them while caught up in our thinking.
In a world where stress, anxiety and mental overload have become almost normalised, understanding this seems more important than ever.
Perhaps freedom isn’t about trying to arrange our lives so that we never experience a low mood.
It’s discovering that we don’t need to be frightened of one.
Life will still have its ups and downs. There will be uncertainty, disappointment, frustration and loss, alongside joy, connection and possibility.
But when we stop demanding that our inner weather should always be sunny, something changes.
We stop fighting ourselves.
And that is one way of understanding what M. Scott Peck meant by transcending the difficulty of life.
