Comfort Close
Some people call it the comfort zone. I call it the comfort close. This deceptive sense of ease that tricks you into coming real close, and then with each passing day, asks you to stay a little longer, do a little more, come a little closer. It pulls you in with the promise of feeling good and that everything will always be okay. In the process, it robs you of your self-confidence, degrades your inner self belief and inserts strategic layers of fear. Placed in the context of anything else and we would all think it was a toxic recipe for disaster that should be maximally avoided.
Instead we are driven towards it.
Rather than moving further away, the closer we get, the closer it pulls us and the more we go there. We hold on tighter, let the grip become stronger, these tentacles of a creeping plant that are solely taking over the whole garden. The plant looked pretty at first. Now it is strangling everything in its path, stealing all the sun and oxygen and ominously barraging forward. So much so that it makes us think there is no other option but to let it go on. The corollary damage and work to break its path seem so daunting and overwhelming – isn’t it easier to just let it be?
Yes, it is. It is much easier, and less time-consuming and won’t reveal any unknown outcome or undesirable surprises. But it also means it won’t show any potential or possibility.
The antidote to the comfort close is the need to get far away. The need to break free of the suffocating barriers we have erected and nurtured for so long that now we think they serve to feed us and nurture us. But that's a lie. There is no nurturing, just sustenance. There is no growth, just stagnation. Staying in the grips of the comfort close mean that all that will ever happen is you will grow closer. So close in fact that you may start to think there is nothing else, no other option. And years later you'll look back to see all the fragmented debris that was around you that you walked straight past because your vision was so narrowed you didn’t even see it. Your vision was so closed off by the grip that held you that once had propelled you, but now just withheld you.
Interrogating into that close grip, those tight hands, is not easy. In fact, many people never do it, spending their whole life thinking it's fine, and then at the end wondering how they missed out on so much living. Living isn't in the same and similarity, repetition, and routine. It's in the unknown and uncertain. It’s in the risk and possibility, spontaneous moment, and indefinite ending. Growth and forward progression aren’t born out of stagnation, but rather movement and activation. They are born out of those first uncomfortable moments of saying yes, staying there, holding on. They are born from saying yes again and again and again until eventually the bar is set for a new normal; discomfort has left.
In the end, there is no recipe or protocol, no guidelines or sequence. Really, it’s just that everything starts at the beginning. Everybody starts with a hard thing or a bit of hesitancy. But not everybody gets closer and closer once the hard thing is over. In fact, some people choose to start pushing away when the closeness is too tight. Start pushing away.