Comfort is Stressful.

Your back hurts from being at work all day. It was one of those days. Nothing sounds better than getting into your comfort zone. An escape from the cage of modernity that we have collectively built around ourselves. All that tension needs a release. Right?

We have comfort and convenience at our finger tips quite literally. Food and comforting external commodities are just a few buttons and swipes away. Nothing sounds better than to plop yourself down on a comfy couch and look at some form of screen or another.

From one box to another, we get use to the routine of this tension and release paradigm. We get easily stressed and try to justify our bad habits as if we think we earned it like rats feasting on the cheeses awarded to them through some menial task. The convenience of technology in the modern world has led us to become more irritable with any minor inconvenience. Yelling at computers, coffee taking too long to brew, traffic, forgetting headphones, etc etc.We seem to be more sensitive to smaller and smaller things. Perspiring over the small details. Where those little devils are.

We are no longer running from ravenous charismatic megafauna trying to eat us. We are running old fleshy software in our modern bodies. We obviously aren't the most optimal, but we are certainly getting there. Evolution isn't stopping anytime soon. These ancient and ancestral stress responses have leaked into how we live our daily lives. There is no threatening tiger at work, but our body tends to act like there is. This is where that doom and gloomy modern anxiety creeps in.

How can we thrive in a civilization with straight lines when nature is all about curves? The spontaneity is lost in the rigidity. Integration has been replaced with compartmentalization. 

When we get too comfortable, our tolerance and conditioned sense of "things going right" tend to get more distorted. Challenges can put our feet to the fire and show us parts of ourselves that we have not observed and expanded upon. Little speedbumps can turn to mountains when we aren't grounded in the possibilities of the unknown arising and presenting opportunities for us in each moment. Things will always happen without your concern or control.

"Couches and comfy chairs may not kill you in one sitting, but overtime they can kill you and transform you into their servants. How deceptively macabre and inviting!" 

We can look at our insecurities in the light and see how decadently domesticated we have become. It's so easy to compartmentalize our lives into little bite size things. Little morsels of things we cling to avoid any type of boredom or peaking anxiety. We hold our empty cup to the things that give us constant stimulation. Things that fill a deep void in our fleshy autonomous bodies. It seems we have crafted a sanitized playscape of sort in this modern world of boxes and deadlines. A landscape of comfort and padded conveniences that deliver us far from all unwelcome existential angst. 

Is there a problem to be solved in this stressful conundrum? Maybe its important to address how complacent we have become in all of this. The world at our fingertips type of rotating magnet that we reside on is so far removed from the mere atrocious discomfort of the past that we forget how well off we are as a society overall. Are we really going to complain how bad the traffic is when we live in a time where we can zip over from one part of another potentially without the need to get out of our cars and get food? Well, to call FastFood "food" is another issue, but an important symbolic gesture when trying to get your point across about the Conspicuously Consumptive Complacency we have conditioned ourselves to. 

" All these little pesky inconveniences in our daily life can get to us. They can turn pebbles into boulders. It's when we engage with these little gnats and try to get rid of them when things start to get harsh and stressful. Take a step back and get out of your own way. Let your mind do what it needs to do." 

All this leisure has seemed to lead to a type of a dead end or at least a confusing cul de sac of sorts. 

Ultimately, we have become so accustomed to separating our lives into different fractured needles. The work life. The home life. The social life. These are all constructs carefully pieced together by an economy of consumption and survival. Buying into this system, we become cogs in the grandiose program of the machine. Like a disease, it spreads. It grows like plant reaching its roots deeper and deeper molding us into its own image. We project and we reflect, but most of the time we subconsciously enforce our unconsciousness on everyone else. We have a tension and release paradigm predicated on perpetuating itself indefinitely and with reckless statistical abandon. All this fracturing creates more tension and conflict. It relies on us working hard and rewarding us for the work we think we did. Like rats in a maze, that cheese looks even better when we have been running around into walls and supposedly "moving forward" to a progressive collectivist ideal thrust upon us by an economy of endless growth. 

CONspicuously 
CONsumptive
Complacency 

We miss the mark in the brimming rim of totality. There is death and rebirth to every waking moment. To the division of "lives" we have created for ourselves. Ants keep marching on to please the queen and keep the society alive. What makes us think that we are any different when we are consistently running the same program over and over. The autopilot function of us moving through time with a sense of purpose akin to a carnivore on the hunt for the next meal. We are told to grow. To get better. For the sake of what? We have missed the little happenings on the way from home to work and in between. Stuck in our heads. Checking off boxes on lists and attempting to meet deadlines for people that are playing the same sick old game over and over. Ah yes, it is stressful to simply think about how we are most of the time unconscious fleshy automatons, but most wake up calls are rather alarming and uninviting. It seems that any sense of "real growth" comes from rude awakenings of unplanned happenings, inconveniences and extreme discomforts taking us outside of our heads and into the ever present moment that we tend to avoid all along.

Is there a point where we reach a point of contentment? Is there a point where we have had enough?

"When is the next meal? Where is the next drink? When do they air the next season? Where will I spend my allotted vacation at this year? Do you see a pattern?" 

Little do we know, everything is happening now and always has. There is just now. Later is concept that never exists.

It's easy to mistake the forest for the trees. All in all we are threaded in a network of influence that we have more impact on that we think. Think about how conditioned we are to "sell" a good "idea". When we have an intuitive response to some intoxicating thread of ideas, we can easily deceive ourselves in thinking that it is worthy of pushing forward into existence for the rest of the world to see. But for what? For a more secure financial future with reward? It's one thing to recognize the dulling effects of security and comfort, but it's another to be enslaved by its illusory fruit. 

What happens when the idea sells? We must crave more. Like an addict, each goal requires the need for another bigger goal of sorts. "Been there, done that." The craving inside us just can't let us rest with the bouquet of roses we hold in our hands. Those roses will inevitably die and we don't see the bigger value of the whole thing, we dig ourselves deeper into a world of ups and downs where we constantly strive for bigger ups when we sink into the low lows. In essence, the roses do not lose value when they die. Only to our conditioned perceptions (all of the past). The worst thing to do would be to throw the roses away. If we put them back into the earth, it provides value for the rest of nature. We are not separate from that grand cycle of nature, but we have built straight angle box societies that want to convince us otherwise. We are nature. Not separate from it. 

" Go out for a walk in nature and escape the suffocation of the city." There goes that tension release paradigm again. The illusion of separateness to keep us in constant stimulation and in line with the machine of our own making. 

Discomfort can be embraced fully. With an open mind and no condemnation. This is the totality of living. There is certainly a distinction between pain and discomfort. Discomfort allows for the opportunity for growth. It will show us things that are falling apart and/or coming together. You have to answer the call and the help will appear, but trying to hard to speak to the "manager" will only get you more stuck. Stuck in the mud of willpower and conflict. Where there are choices, there is conflict.

ON. TO. THE. NEXT. ONE. 

Now can you see the totality? Not just the word, but the concept. The big picture if you will. 

We are so conditioned to go from work to reward that it becomes a trying and stressful cycle that repeats itself with each circumambulatory motion. With each task, we start to live in that hyper sphere of anxiety. The idea of doing nothing and being "lazy" becomes more and more intriguing. Anything to escape the drudgery that we have locked ourselves in. We have built ourselves in small comfortable cages answering to masters that we thought would serve us. It's come to a screeching halt. A padded room of opportunities catering to our fleeting needs and desires. The walls may be padded, but we still are contained in a hard skeletal structure limited to the biological struggle of the past. 

We tell ourselves we are content and happy, but beneath the surface we know that it is not quite enough. We attempt to sip tea in those little pockets of time that we make for ourselves. Away from the hustle and the bustle. Away from the constant chatter and noise we expose ourselves too. Small little vacations allowing for us to breathe. But we know it is only temporary. The anxiety creeps in like a virus. Like a late night on a Sunday just knowing that we are in for another week of work. Another treacherous routine of predictability, problems and acting out the part we think we chose to play. Have to pay the bills someway right?

NEWSFLASH: IT IS NEVER ENOUGH! (At least that is what they want us to think. )

Within all of this is a stillness. A stillness that is unmovable from the external world. A silence that does not demand your attention. An atmosphere of serenity always changing and moving with what is. It's always there. Always accessible. Always a part of everything that is happening. It requires no wisdom or effort. It is a surrender to the wave of time. Not an escape, but a revelation. An invitation to experience all the chemical reactions happening to you all at once. It is not comfort. It is the ability to feel what is happening without trying to change it. An unmovable breeze of potential and acceptance of everything that is and was. Discomfort is what you make it. It is experiencing in all its glory. A completion of all that we thought needed to be fixed. 

Falling apart is coming together. See, observe and feel. Embrace the so called "discomfort". Embrace the loud silence. It's happening all around you. It always has. 

Comfort corrupts. 

DG