Dear Helen,
I have been wrestling with a question lately, and it seems like the kind of thing you’d have interesting thoughts on. How do we reconcile our desire for comfort and ease with our desire for growth, which nearly always comes with discomfort?
Thank you!
At Odds
Dear At Odds,
This is a question that I'd have given a completely different answer to only a few years ago. I would've thought some kind of ✨strategy✨ would need to be employed, or, at the very least, a bit of noodling on the mechanics of competing desires.
But, nowadays, it looks quite a bit simpler to me.
As I see it, there's nothing to reconcile here. Nothing is actually at odds.
Some moments, you will gravitate toward so-called comfort.
Some moments, you will gravitate toward so-called edginess—or something you might describe as being "outside your comfort zone."
And truly, only a mind would categorize your actions as one or the other. Minds love to make distinctions; they love to chop up the seamless, flowing experience of life and slap a label on each component.
This is me, seeking comfort.
This is me, striving for growth.
That's just the function of the mind. It's what minds do.
In reality, though, you're doing what occurs to you in any given moment—be it watching Netflix on the couch or putting in the miles to train for a marathon.
Your mind might say that one activity is 'easy' and the other is 'hard'; it will probably even suggest that one merits more kudos than the other.
But such distinctions couldn't possibly exist outside of a mind.
Minds think in black-and-white and they have strong opinions (often changing and contradicting themselves, though they won't cop to that). It sounds like your mind has a lot to say about how you spend your time, and whether or not you're choosing the kind of activities that require you to step outside of what's comfortable and easy.
Your mind also has ideas about how and when growth happens (and I'd bet anything it has evidence to support its claims).
Who could say that growth occurs mainly through discomfort? (A mind would totally say that, but, really: How do we know that's true?)
It sounds like your mind is recalling what it believes about growth, maybe even remembering past experiences of growth—how uncomfortable things felt, how you were in limbo for a period of time or stretched in some particular way—and it's trying to reverse-engineer the whole thing going forward. Like, I grew so much via such-and-such experience; my memory of it is that I was super uncomfortable and challenged the whole time. Ergo, in order to keep growing as a person, I must make sure I'm seeking out experiences that are uncomfortable and difficult.
What the mind won't like to hear (because it renders moot the mind's chatter and scheming) is that we're changing and growing constantly, regardless of what we do with our time.
Uncomfortable, challenging moments (that may or may not inspire something we'd later refer to as 'growth') arise on their own over the course of a life, and we respond in the moment in whatever way occurs to us. Some future version of us might look back on all that and call it 'growth,' even though we didn't choose it or make any real decisions about it; it was just the natural unfolding of circumstances, plus our common sense responses to those events.
As I said, the mind will come in and want to chop up everything. It will want to know which season of life you're in right now, and when it will end, and what efforts you plan to put forth in the spirit of growth. It will want to know if the marathon is challenging enough or should it have been a triathlon? And what will be your growth project after this? As though that's the only way you'll grow, if you're consciously moving toward some outward goal that requires so-called discomfort and discipline.
Of course your mind is going to wrestle with this question, At Odds! It feels like something you really have to reconcile, because it feels like there really are two competing desires at play. But, in truth, there is no binary here. Comfort and growth aren't in opposition to each other. How could they be?
I'm going to take it a step further with this: You don't even need to be intentional in order to grow.
Your mind is going to resist that statement, because it goes against everything a mind believes it needs to do to advance our position in life (not to mention what we've been societally conditioned to believe about growth)—but maybe that's exactly where real, honest-to-goodness growth lies: in considering that you don't have to do anything in particular in order to grow.
Bodies and minds grow all the time, without our involvement or effort—even in spite of our blessedly messy interference.
I hope this helps!
Love,
Helen