Comfort

TL;DR The only comfort in life is found through accepting that you will never be fully comfortable

I have been struggling with this topic for quite some time, let me explain. We all instinctively seek comfort in our lives. That’s why there is the whole concept of a comfort zone and the things beyond it. And, as TRP preaches, we ought to actively seek the outside of our comfort zones, challenge ourselves to go out there and conquer the odds, actively expanding our own "comfort zone". However, that won't mean we'll never feel discomfort...

I often fear the future and what it might bring. I oftentimes get anxious about the upcoming challenges even if I don't clearly see them yet. I assume most people are like that in general. And I rarely feel fully comfortable even though there seems to be a primal instinct deep inside me to constantly seek that full comfort in life. But here's the irony of this - a man could never have full comfort in their lives:

Let's say you have everything you could have ever wanted - you have your whole life at a perfect state and you are sitting at your favorite sofa, drinking a big glass of expensive wine, the fireplace is keeping you warm, wife is making dinner, you have a great job or maybe you don't even need to work and everything is simply...perfect. But there is still no full comfort even in that perfect moment. Because, even if this perfect state of your life remains that way for many days, months or years to come, if nothing else bad happens to you, you'd still day someday. One way or another, things will crumble and the perfection will be gone. And, of course, perfection is hardly ever a thing in the life of anybody's life. And yet, we still crave comfort...

So, how can we get there? I have been thinking about it and I think there are two aspects of actually finding comfort in our lives:

Embracing the discomfort

This is where the part of getting out of your comfort zone comes into play. In fact, you are oftentimes forcibly pushed out of it against your wish...and that's okay. You have to get used to that feeling, that nasty, uncomfortable, unpleasant feeling when something is making you uncomfortable. Maybe you have lost your job or your job sucks and you need to find a new one, maybe you are on bad terms with the people closest to you, maybe there's some other challenge you need to face - embrace it, accept it, own it.

Our default setting, the default setting of our lives is to feel uncomfortable, we get thirsty, hungry, tired, horny, we need to take a piss or a shit and this is everyday - discomfort is always there but we only notice the exceptions, the things that are either bigger or simply the ones we are not used to yet. But discomfort will always be there, there will always be something in the back of our minds to bug us and this leads us to my next point...

It's all the same

Whether you have to go to a shit job but you let it slide cause you are used to it or someone close to you that has always been nice to you suddenly starts to treat you like shit, it's not that different - both things are unpleasant, both make you uncomfortable. The difference is you are used to the first one and the second one is something new to you but in their cores, it's all the same shitty feeling of something not being quite right. And, as said above, there's always going to be something "not quite right".

I suppose that the reason we (or at least I) hardly ever feel at ease and comfortable is because our idea of comfort (as our ideas of many other things, e.g. love, relationships, sex, happiness, success, etc.) is unrealistic. We all have that idea in our minds of a perfect life where we are all comfortable and shit's great but that's impossible to achieve now, is it? So comfort isn't really that, it isn't really a perfect life, it is our ability to be uncomfortable and still move on with our lives and the more we understand this and embed it in our minds, internalize it in our attitude towards life, the better (more comfortable) we'd feel in adverse (uncomfortable) situations.

P.S.

I understand that I wasn't particularly articulate in this post as I had difficulty arranging my thoughts in a logical write-up. Still, I hope you get the idea. I must also say that I am very, very far away from that "Zen" state that I am trying to put into words in the paragraphs above. In fact, this post is me trying to make sense of things and give myself a general direction and some sort of hope that it is indeed possible to be comfortable with all the uncomfortable things that are bound to come to me as well as to all of us. I'd appreciate your feedback and thoughts on the topic. I understand that this isn't strictly TRP material but I hope it finds its place on this subreddit as it seemed appropriate to me to post my thoughts on this matter here.