Seems like a lot of us are living in a kind of false security, a kind of temporary place of sort-of-comfort, a little hole of mediocrity, it might feel at its worst, or maybe, at its best, something that’s all right, good enough, safe and comfortable.
Or maybe it’s not feeling that way anymore.
But typically there is- between the place that we are now in the place that we want to be is a lot of difficult territory.
The road of development typically is not through comfortable terrain.
I strongly believe that once the ball gets rolling, it becomes a clearly better way of life.
We don’t have to get to some kind of full achievement level in order to enjoy it better.
We just need to get started, get moving in a good direction, and that makes life better, just by virtue of feeling like this is the right path.
But to get to that point, from the comfortable place to the better place, it will certainly go through some difficult territory.
And it seems like this is what stops people.
This is what gets people into the comfortable place to begin with.
And I know that’s how it was with me.
I didn’t want to face the uncomfortable things I wanted to be comfortable and happy at all times.
So I avoided doing anything that was uncomfortable.
And doing this builds up a little house of comfort, a little place where everything is set up to be inoffensive, to be pleasant, agreeable, and not particularly challenging.
Everything out there that was uncomfortable, outside the comfort zone, was avoided.
And, of course, you can imagine what this leads to.
The comfortable place becomes a smaller and smaller trap.
The longer time we spend in comfort, the less ability we have to handle the difficulties of life, and so the domain of this comfort zone shrinks smaller and smaller until it becomes a prison where we languish and weaken.
And that left me feeling like I needed to change.
I needed to get out of this hole, and I knew that there was something out there.
I knew that there was a better way of living.
But in every direction around my little house of comfort, everything was uncomfortable.
There was no way to change my situation without stepping into discomfort.
I had to make things worse before they got better.
This seems like the biggest obstacle to starting change, to starting a self-development journey: letting go of some of our comforts and being able to step into this unknown, uncomfortable wilderness of pain with the faith that we are making steps that will lead to something brighter, something better.
It sounds extreme, and sometimes it does feel that way, because living in that house of comfort, anything that’s slightly uncomfortable seems like a terrible thing.
The longer we live in comfort, the more difficult it is to do anything uncomfortable, the more anything becomes a challenge.
But the bright side of all this is, although it can look like an endless wilderness outside, outside the comfort zone, once we start moving in that wilderness, once we start moving through discomfort, we start to become stronger, and then the journey itself can become an enjoyable one, an enjoyable challenge, and we can start to get our own little island of comfort, our own little travelling comfort zone, as we travel through the wilderness of discomfort knowing that the simple knowledge that we’re moving in the right direction, moving in a good direction, is enough to make this discomfort into something not only bearable, but something that can be embraced, because we know that this is a step on the way to the life we want to live.
And then it starts to feel like it’s a prison escape.
We’re leaving that prison of comfort behind and going out on a real-life adventure.