Content Over Comfort

Choosing yourself by exploring the unknown & growing past comfort zones, rather than settling into a 'comfortable known,' may be the greatest form of self-respect you may do.

Let's circle back here for a moment from the previous story "Remembering Who You Are"; people choose their unhappiness. What?... Crazy, I know, but more often than not unhappiness is a choice people make. Continuously. Of course, there is suffering and plenty of it in the world that wasn't deliberately sought after by those directly impacted (i.e., starvation, poverty, war, violated rights, and abuse just to name a few relevant extremes). For this context, I am talking about the smaller, everyday actions and choices people make such as continuously choosing to stay in an unhappy/unhealthy relationship, or in an unsatisfactory career path, in places or dynamics they've outgrown, and so on. I'm referring to the people who have settled into this depressive comfortability because it is known.

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(I know this may come across as harsh but stay with me here, I promise I will keep this story short, and I will end it on a sweet note.)

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Look, in some capacity we've all stayed in this comfortable known for a bit longer than our welcome. Change can be scary and the unknown even more so, but you can feel that resistance when you've outgrown that comfort zone. Sometimes, just being unhappy isn't enough to invoke change but trust me, when something is no longer a fit, you will be pushed. Shoved, if you will. Tried and tested again and again. It may even feel as it the whole world is against you, that you never seem to be able to catch a break. Well, change and the unknown may be intimidating, but if you were to be truly honest with yourself, would you still think you were comfortable with where you are? Is all of the fighting, or resisting, to stay in this unhappiness worth avoiding change?

Change is not easy, not really, but it is a beautifully necessary thing. By Gods, it has been painful staying where I am at times, yet the unknown of "what next?" can be incredibly terrifying. Or rather the desperate need for change, any change, while unsure exactly how to: how to move forward or past the point of where you are, when the path forward is unclear, uncertain, or difficult to imagine as possible. If that even makes any sense at all. I may not have all of the answers, hell if any of us do, yet I want to and I will try to do better with what I have. The key, I believe, is to find contentment in the process over comfort in the idea. Life unfolds in the simple moments and in the repetitive, seemingly mundane rituals of our daily lives. You have the choice to do and be better each moment, to show up to the best of your ability, and to find contentment within your process; then little by little everything else will fall into place. Change can be terrifying, but so can be staying somewhere you've outgrown. So, dear reader, choose to cultivate contentment over comfortability. Who knows, you might just find happiness along the way.