About thirty years ago, I was on the Island of Jamaica for a vacation that was supposed to restore my calm, peace, and stability. While staying with friends there, I met their father who was 84 years old. He went outside to get a coconut from his coconut tree, and while he was cutting the coconut open with his machete, I asked him what kind of advice he could give to a young man my age to fair well in life. He responded, “take life easy.” Not satisfied with such a simple answer, I asked the question in a different way, and his response was the same. Finally, I raised other questions to glean some wisdom from his age and experience and again he said to me, “take life easy.”
Sometimes it takes a long time to learn a simple truth. Stress prohibits the free flow of life. Athletes relax before events so they can perform their best. “Ahh, but isn’t discipline itself a way of bringing stress,” you may ask. I am glad you raised that point. I am finding that when I am most at ease in my discipline, or my consistency, I am the most relaxed and when I am most relaxed, I can be focused to be my most disciplined. I guess you might say that relaxed discipline is learning how to put the right stress in the right place at the right time, in order to make what is difficult easy, and make life more enjoyable. Life does get easier when you stop stressing about doing, and just get up and get going. When we discipline ourselves to relax and enjoy life, even our vacations will be less stressful, and we can indeed, take life easy every day.