Yes, you read that right. Let me tell you about masochism today.

One of the challenges of this current era in modern, developed societies is that everything is becoming easier than ever before. You have 200 channels on TV with a remote, porn and music and software are free on internet, you don't have to stick your key into your car to open it.

For the most part, I'd say hurray for the easiness. We can now spend the better part of our life doing something worthwhile. Except now it's gotten harder to find that something worthwhile. Not because they are not out there, but becuase we are no longer used to pain and struggle. At the first sign of such, we take the easy way out -- because we can.

Yet all truly worthwhile things in life are often very inconvenient. I can tell you, playing the guitar is one of the hardest things I do. I can spend hours and years toiling away at it and still far from mastering it. Very inefficient. I can also tell you that kids are the most inconvenient things in my life. Yesterday, my wife tells me my baby son pooped on the floor 3 times! Well, that's cute (to us desensitized parents) but him crying all night isn't funny to us. I realize that we are choosing to raise them in ways that are decidedly more inconvenient than they have to be, but sometimes convenience has to go out the window if you want to do something worthwhile.

Of all the things I can do in my life, I put "tackling a great challenge" as number 2. It's because easy things are that: easy. These days, easy hangs out with boredom and lethargy. Easy and growth, easy and learning something new, easy and joy -- they don't see eye to eye in my life.

The last few weeks of recording my album was such an intense experience, precisely because it was very difficult. I tried and tried to commit excellence on tape but what I got was mediocre. Finally at the end, I had to give up, not because it was excellent but because it was all I could do. My album falls short of the excellence I envisioned for it, but yet I came away from the experience with satisfaction, knowing that finally I have found something I can't do easily. I'm not finished with music yet because music beat me on the first round, I lost to it.

But I really wasn't prepared for what followed. Having done something where I had to pull out all my stops, now nothing else seems remotely engaging or interesting. I keep looking for something that'll push me to at least the same vicinity of the extreme I visited back then -- but all I think about is making more music. Making music that is harder to make than the last batch. To use a boxing analogy, I'd say if I beat an opponent and know that he is now below my league, I have no need to fight him again. But the champion who beat me, I must campaign for a rematch. It'll be painful to fight him again but if I want to be an excellent boxer then that's the only way I'm going to grow.

I must be a masochist or something, for I crave that pain, that sensation of being stretched so far that I think I'm going to tear apart. While I'm in the midst I yearn for an easy life -- thinking how silly of me to put myself in that situation, when life doesn't have to be that hard, not any more. But yet, here in easyville, I long to be pushed and broken. It's a violent life, but it seems that breaking and rebuilding is the only way for me to move forward.