As I’ve often noted before on this site, there is a lot that goes on ‘behind the scenes’ in our minds, and this unseen background activity accounts for the majority of the way in which our lives unfold. One of the greatest ’shapers’ of our lives is our unseen drive for comfort.
This drive serves a natural purpose. It encourages us to keep our bodies and minds in an efficient state so that we can make the most efficient use of our resources. In essence, it’s a survival drive, urging us to keep food in our bodies, seek shelter so as not to die of hypothermia or heat, and maintain an emotional equilibrium so that we can attend to the necessities of life instead of spending all of our time attending to our emotional highs or lows.
Comfort in the Wild
In a wilderness setting, this drive is quite useful. During my time in the woods, the pain and annoyance of mosquito bites urged me to find shelter from them, and perhaps helped me avoid getting bit by a mosquito that was carrying a disease. Gnawing hunger kept me looking for food, thirst reminded me that I should search out water, and loneliness kept me seeking human or animal companions. However, in the wilderness, the range of what we’d call ‘comfortable’ becomes very broad. Because there isn’t always enough food or water, and because there aren’t too many other humans in the woods, and because it is difficult to control the temperature of your environment, you become conditioned to extremes of sensation that would seem intolerable to a ‘civilized’ person.
Let’s Go Comfort Crazy!
As is the case with many natural drives, our comfort calibration gets all out of whack when we live in civilization. In fact, most of civilization seems to center around making life as comfortable as possible. Instead of being a natural, helpful drive, the quest for comfort becomes our life goal, despite the fact that we’re all going to die in the end (a fact which makes most of us so uncomfortable that we just try to ignore it until death comes knocking on our door.)
So we go comfort crazy. Most of us live in climate controlled buildings, most of us never have to be really hungry (food is readily available whenever we want it), water is just a turn of the faucet handle away, and even our emotional state is moderated with self-help books, drugs, movies, music, or websites like this one. If we observe where this quest is going, it almost seems that our highest aspiration is to live in a cocoon where nothing ever changes and everything is perfectly safe and comfortable all the time.
Get Me Uncomfortable!
Of course, many of us soon find that perfect comfort is rather cloistering, and start to seek out ‘uncomfortable’ situations, whether that means watching a horror movie or challenging our fears. Usually, we’ll choose culturally sanctioned discomfort (the movie), because we consider the primal discomforts (pain, hunger, thirst) to be very terrible things. But it is these primal discomforts that have the greatest ability to open up our world. How many of us have actually experienced real hunger? How about real thirst? How about going without sleep or being really cold or really hot?
Now that I’m back in civilization, I know that my own range of comfort tolerance has become pretty narrow. I like my shower to be ‘just right’ before I step in, and I think I’m pretty hungry if I miss even a single meal. Most people would consider my life to be much ‘better’ than it was when I was living in the woods, but in many ways my life now feels much less rich and vibrant than it did when I considered a broader range of sensations to be acceptable.
Living Wild in Civilization
We are able to experience this vibrant way of living even if we’re surrounded by comfort. As you can see by my own example, however, it’s difficult (after all, comfort is SO tempting . . .). I do it by two methods — seeking out discomfort, and allowing discomfort. Seeking it out means simply to challenge your ideas of what is pleasant to experience. It means stepping out into the rain and turning your face to the sky. It means turning your shower from hot to cold and feeling what it does to your flesh. It means skipping a meal so that you can feel what it’s like to really want your food (hunger really is the best sauce). This is not about becoming an ascetic. It’s simply about exploring sensations that are not usually encountered in our civilized lives.
Often, allowing discomfort comes into play when we encounter emotions that we’ve been taught are ‘bad’. When we feel anger or annoyance or fear, it means really allowing ourselves to experience those sensations. ‘Negative’ emotions are discovered to be just what they are — resistance to experience — and we discover a whole new way to experience our emotional lives.
Something magical happens when we seek out and allow discomfort. Our ideas of comfort change, and our focus in life shifts away from a blind drive to seek comfort, and instead becomes a focus toward experiencing life. This is when our judgments begin to fall away, and we notice that emotions and sensations that we avoided before are actually the very things which make life rich and wondrous.
Coming Full Circle
As children, most of us accept a broad range of experience. As we age, however, we narrow that range until our life experience has to fit very precise definitions in order to be acceptable to us. To come full circle, our journey into true adulthood means coming to see the enormous potential for experience that lies about us all the time, if only we’re willing to venture outside the bubble of security and comfort we create around ourselves.
Let’s experience life!
Rebecca and I invite you to visit our latest Adventure Journal, as well as our Wild About Nature blog!
