Comfort and Adventure

There are worse things to be than uncomfortable.

I am a firm believer in comfort, it has to be said. Comfort is a rare and fleeting quality in this world, and people who insist that the only way to live is to get out of your comfort zone don’t seem to take into account how much effort goes into creating that comfort and how quickly it can vanish even in the best of times. It should be cherished, not scorned.

And yet there are times when it is worth it to be uncomfortable.

I am not an adventurous person. I have adventures, because I have learned to say yes and I’m willing to be uncomfortable, and it has been worth it. Some of those adventures are among my most treasured memories.

I have traveled, for example. For someone who once had to have the concept of “cabin fever” explained to him (“you mean I stay in my home with my stuff and nobody bothers me and this is a problem … why?”) I have been to a surprising number of places. Surprising to me, anyway. I’ve seen beautiful and amazing things, been to fascinating places, and met welcoming and lovely people along the way. I’ve had the good fortune to do all that with my family and to visit friends on the other end of those travels. I look forward to doing all of that again in the near future, revisiting old places and exploring new ones. And if there is always some discomfort lurking in the background so far from home, well, so be it. It’s a small price to pay for such experiences.

The experiences stick with me long after the discomfort fades away.

I make a good part of my living speaking in public, after all. That’s what teaching is, at least in part – standing in front of an audience and trying to get them to listen even when they don’t want to do so. It took me a long time to learn how to be comfortable doing that. It didn’t come naturally. And yet now I enjoy it. What discomfort I started with has long faded.

There is a certain amount of privilege in this position, I suppose.

Everybody has operating costs – how much energy it takes to live your life. Sometimes those costs exceed what people have available to get from one end of the day to the other and all you can do in that situation is hold on as best you can, borrow energy from your future, and hope things get better. Sometimes the costs and the expenses line up and that’s a comfortable place to be. And sometimes you have more than you need, and you can spend some of the surplus on things like being a little uncomfortable in a new place or a new situation, in the service of something larger. It is a good thing to have that surplus, and I’m grateful for it.

One of my favorite lines in cinema comes from Lawrence of Arabia. It’s early in the film, still at a point where the director is establishing just what sort of character T.E. Lawrence actually was. There are a couple of men in a tent (the almost total absence of women in this three-hour epic film is one of the most singular things in movie history) and one of them is trying (and failing) to extinguish a match with his fingers. Lawrence then puts it out by squeezing the flame between his fingers. The first guy tries to imitate that and then yelps.

“Oh! It damn well hurts!” he says.

“Of course it hurts,” Lawrence replies.

“What’s the trick, then.”

“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”

If you’re willing to be uncomfortable for a bit and able to pay that cost, the world is a more adventurous and interesting place. And that is a lesson worth learning.