Western culture has things a little backwards right now. We think that if we had every comfort available to us, we’d be happy. We equate comfort with happiness. And now we’re so comfortable we’re miserable. There’s no struggle in our lives. No sense of adventure. We get in a car, we get in an elevator, it all comes easy. What I’ve found is that I’m never more alive than when I’m pushing and I’m in pain, and I’m struggling for high achievement, and in that struggle I think there’s a magic.
Ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes
It hit me recently that “comfort” had become our contemporary religion. People might disagree about religion and its place in our value structure, they might have divergent views on politics, but on one point a broad spectrum of people seems to have landed in a plush heap of concurrence: Comfort, in all its facets, is everything.
“Not comfortable,” we hear again and again, as if everyone had woken up one morning and arranged their own coronation as a king or queen, a monarch propped up on plush pillows, protected from nary a concern, forever insulated from any actual contact with real life or physical sensation beyond the pampering arts of hot baths and massage.
The physical state of reclining on a Barcalounger or in bed to watch TV for hour after hour after hour has become the basic unit of life. TV brings comfort because it brings nothingness, emptiness of content hidden in a wall of ostensibly energetic white noise, not so much an opportunity to relax or reflect as the chance to stop existing, like Neo in his pod before his awakening in “The Matrix,” cut off, floating inertly toward an inevitable appointment with death.
The belief in comfort as a guiding principle shapes our existences through and through. We run up credit card debt buying crap we don’t need because we think it will make us more comfortable, and then amid the stress of financial pressure, we seek to cordon ourselves further off from new experience, from variety, from actual life.
If you were lying in a hospital bed, looking back on your life, would you lament not having been comfortable enough? Or would you be more likely to wish you’d taken more chances, followed the siren call to venture forth, as Rilke put it, “to become like one of those who drive through the night with wild horses, with torches, which like unloosened hair blow in the great wind of their pursuit”?
It’s an axiom of travel that mishaps add to the experience, better for the good story they yield than they are bad for the discomfort of dealing with them. When forced to step outside of our comfort zone, as the numbing phrase has it, we come to life, we feel more, we see more, we taste more. I can only laugh every time I hear someone sit down to dinner and declare with great robotic sonorousness that they “don’t like” this or that. How do they know? I grew up hating spinach and, especially Brussels sprouts, which to me tasted like barf. Sarah laughed at me often enough over my Brussels sprouts aversion that I’ve given them a fresh try and, yes, past my fiftieth birthday developed a taste for them (danke, Schatz).
I’d given up yoga because, the fourth time I tried it, a Manhattan woman who thought she was a Marine drill sergeant despised me instantly for some combination of qualities (being male? sweating? not lifting my butt enough in downward-facing dog?) and was openly rude and hostile to me. It was not comfortable to give yoga another try. It was definitely not comfortable to twist into some of the intermediate positions, nor to have the feeling of falling out of a standard balancing pose. I kept at it and now enjoy yoga very much.
No creative person staring at the white page or the blank canvas ever felt comfortable. Great! Otherwise, they’d feel very little impulse to create. Sarah thinks it’s a gaudy indulgence of mine to skip breakfast many mornings because I like to be hungry when I write. I’ll often grab something very small, so I’m not famished, but the background hum of hunger has a way of deepening the tints and shadings of my inner landscape, from which I write; the hunger has a way of adding a certain urgency to the project of trying to tap into an idea, a feeling, or a story with freshness and immediacy stripped of affect.
I’m not sure what I think of Dean Karnazes and running a marathon a day – definitely not my thing – but I know that for me running the Berlin Marathon a few years ago was one of the great experiences of my life, and to get to the point where it was possible to run a marathon required a progression of putting myself in a position to feel very uncomfortable – physically uncomfortable, but above all, uncomfortable with the certainty of the pain I would endure.
The word “comfort” derived over time from the Latin confortare, to strengthen greatly, and therefore has always carried a connotation of being removed from fear. The mind-set now is not only to be removed from fear, but to be removed from even having to be aware of the potential for fear: this is the fetish of comfort. It’s another form of being ruled by fear.
I happen to enjoy a little fear. When Sarah and I decided to host a surprise 60th birthday party with close to 100 guests for my cousin Jim, a great guy who deserved a memorable bash, of course I felt a deep current of fear. In fact, I felt raw terror. And Sarah and I had to work from morning until late night for at least a week before that party to prepare. There were those who thought we were out of our minds to put so much into something like a party, when it would have been easier to use plastic plates, for example, or to pick up snack trays from Costco instead of cooking everything from scratch. But we had a lot of help from different people and anyway we took enjoyment in creating a special experience for Jim and all his friends that people would remember later. It took venturing far from any notion of “comfort” to do that, and we’d do it again.
Not everyone needs to be crazy like Sarah and me when it comes to working so hard on an event. Everyone has their own areas of life where they could easily take chances and open up some new possibilities. It could be volunteering, to get involved in some other lives, it could be taking a course to learn to cook when in the past it was mostly fast food and TV dinners, it could be going for a grueling 1,000-mile drive in your car rather than flying and seeing things you’ve never seen before, or it could be nudging yourself to go to more social gatherings and really listen to people, not just swap memories of ’70s TV shows or trot out thrice-baked opinions on racist basketball owners or crazy ideas about how radiation travels.
I wouldn’t claim to advocate everything Lou Reed had in mind with “Take a Walk on the Wild Side,” but I like the spirit. Here’s to challenging yourself to take a step toward walking on the wild side, a step away from your comfort zone toward all the excitement and variety of a world we’ll never do more than briefly sample in our time here.
– Steve Kettmann, co-founder, WCR
Steve’s earlier blogs:
Remembering Those We’ve Loved and Lost
Were You Kind to Someone Today?