Challenges: A life without obstacles

Have you ever wondered what life would be without challenges? Maybe we would still be in the Garden of Eden just eating fruits and jumping around with different animals coz the first challenge man failed was eating the forbidden fruit (well, according to the bible). Life is indeed full of challenges and of course, it is different for everyone as both the rich and the poor have their fair share of challenges but we can all agree that the one thing that makes a lot of challenges easy to overcome is money, that's the major obstacle of the poor when it comes to tackling challenges.

I see challenges as something that isn't entirely bad and I have come to embrace them because I have noticed over the years that being able to overcome challenges helps me to become a better version of myself. Now, of course, some challenges are too difficult or even too traumatic but in the end, I still learn something from those. Challenges are one of the fundamental pillars that build our character and life-long experiences, because it's mostly what you pass through that determines your mindset towards life.

Some people become better after overcoming a challenge, while others become worse, and I won't blame them because everyone has their way of responding to a challenge and it's easy to judge people for the choices they make if you are not or have never been in their shoes. Anyway, all these things I'm saying are just me building up to my response on whether I will eliminate all obstacles in my kids' way just to make life as easy as possible for them and the short answer is no, I will explain why.

As I said earlier, challenges aren't entirely bad and being able to figure out things on your own actually builds up intelligence. Eliminating all obstacles in my children's way would mean I will always be the one solving all their problems and is that actually a bad thing? Yes. One thing I believe in life is that help should only be offered to people who have tried their best and actually put in the effort to solve a problem. For example, if your kids just started school and they start bringing assignments home, would you just do the assignments for them because you want to make life easy for them?

In the end, one of the biggest challenges for us as kids is school assignments, so agreeing to remove all obstacles, would mean doing assignments for my kids. I believe by now you are already seeing how that will eventually lead to a disaster, maybe to the point where you will start paying their teachers just for them to pass their exams, so for how long will that continue? Till they graduate from the university? I'm not saying I will totally leave my kids to suffer through life but there are certain challenges they are meant to solve on their own just to become better in life

We have so many spoiled and over-pampered kids today because their parents toiled this same path of "making things easy" for their children. They don't do anything at home and aren't disciplined if they do something wrong, and that's how they grow up into adults who can't even do basic things like cooking and cleaning their house. From my experience, being able to overcome challenges improves my problem-solving skills and that's one important skill to have in life. I discovered long ago that whenever I solve a problem on my own, it creates a lasting memory than when I just leave it for someone else to solve.

This is why I embrace challenges and even though a challenge looks impossible at first, I will put in everything I can to solve it and eventually ask for help, the good thing is that I will get help in solving it and also see the gaps in the solutions I brought up earlier. That's much better than not trying at all. So, if it's an obstacle that is impossible for my children to overcome, I will guide them through it and let them discover the solution on their own. That's a system I used back when I was a teacher; whenever a student is struggling to solve a problem, I don't show them the answer immediately but rather guide them through it and build up their reasoning.

In the end, there's no manual to life and some people will say they are going to remove every obstacle from their children's lives, I don't have a problem with that and it's their life, so they can make choices they think are better for their family. As for me, I won't eliminate all obstacles, but that doesn't mean I am going to do something crazy like pretending to be poor and forcing them to go through hardship 😅 but as I said earlier, everyone faces challenges in one form or the other, so I will let them carry their cross but help out of it gets too heavy for them to carry.

Thanks for reading