Training isn't hard.
Well let me change that.
Training shouldn't be hard. It shouldn't be the hardest thing we have to face in our scope of life or they wouldn't mandate it now.
Sure there are those close calls with death. Those lonely nights, wishing we could go back home because the diseases of nostalgia and sentimentality have set in. Or those days where you just wanted to throw in the towel, pay the fine, and give up. The long hours put into each and every member of your team, human and pokemon alike, because you needed to stay on top of your game to survive in that tumultuous world. Maybe it was the betrayal felt when a companion let you down or you let yourself fall even harder than anyone could have ever done. Or what about the pain, the agony, the sharp, dull, everlasting, yet so quick, heartbreak that manifests when your pokemon dies, or you have to release it, or your friends die, or you feel every little remnant of the person you used to be fade away.
No, training shouldn't be hard because, eventually, you grow, you learn, you get used to it. The pain ebbs away, the fears dissipate, the nostalgia promotes growth and motivates, the deaths proliferate life, and those long hours, propagated by the sting of failure and the promise of success, pay off. Each win becomes as sweet as honey and every loss serves as a motivating factor. Being a trainer inspires, conquers weakness, and molds capable and resourceful citizens.
It changes a person. No, not their core values and personalities, in fact, if anything, those values and personalities are strengthened, solidified because those are one of the only constants that you have to fall back on. But the little things, maybe an opinion; a style of living; a fear; these are the things that are changed. These are the things that eventually make you into someone new. The shy, become confidently shy. The nervous, solid as stone. The indecisive, probably stay indecisive, but to a lesser degree. The heroes can become villains, and your villain might rise up to become a hero, or at least an anti-hero.
What should be hard, the thing that is hard, if you consider part of training, are the decisions you have to make while training. Do you form close bonds? Do you subject yourself to love? Can you afford to settle down? Will your psyche allow you to give up? Will you ever stop training? It's a constant battle, making decisions, anticipating their outcomes, and then dealing with their consequences. Not because it will change you as a trainer, or make training more difficult, it's because that decision to stop. The ultimate choice of when and where in your life to stop training becomes hard to make. Your life becomes training, becomes waiting, becomes battling, becomes escaping, turns into strategy, stays like warfare. Your life life is now tinted by a hue that resembles the life you've chosen to give up. Those productive citizens, though successful, yearn for that rush of battle, of war, of surviving, but circumstances, one or the other prevents from doing so. Sure, there's always recreation, battling in offhand tournaments, some exhibitions here and there, but there's nothing quite the same as that environment of being in that world. Of being a real trainer. Some of us never quit. There are still those today, late in age, who still fight the good fight. Who still train and try with their teams of old and new pokemon alike. Those who have left, and will continue to leave, their mark on the society as a whole because of their zeal and love for their practice.
Me? Well that information cannot be disclosed at this instant, but do know I've carefully considered my past, present, and probably circumstances and they've shaped my decision.
But the first experience that shaped this choice was my acquiring of my starter.
This is the story of how I took on the world of training with nothing but intuition, passion, and a Minun.