Take yourself back to first grade
or kindergarten
or nursery school
or wherever you first learned
how to really learn:

One thing at a time.
One fascinating thing
that intrigued you at first
pulling you in,
with its shiny
sexy
foreign
just-a-bit-beyond-you
mystery
and newness.

Your shoes,
maybe,
the first time you pictured
them going from untied
to tied
without grownup
intervention.

A carrot,
perhaps,
lumpy and long,
with delicate hairs
someone showed you
how to shave off
slowly,
in curls,
onto a paper towel.

You whittled at least one
down to nothing at all
I'll bet.
You put your left arm
into your right sleeve,
at least a hundred times,
maybe more.
You made your "e"s backwards
and your grass purple
and your shoelaces, knots.

Again and again,
a thousand times
eleventy-billion times
you did it
R-O-N-G

And now you say
this is hard?

This omelet?
This iambic pentameter?
This 1040EZ
backhand
bar chord
start-up
dismount
mea culpa
marriage?

Of course it's hard.
That's
why
you
do
it.

xxx
c

Image by Beth Nazario via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.