Finding and/or creating change is tied directly to this.Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

What is a comfort zone? Often, it’s not a place that’s actually comfortable. No, frequently a comfort zone is a place that’s familiar, known, and relatively stable for you.

Your comfort zone can be mental, emotional, spiritual, or physical. Mentally, it might be an ideal, a truth, a belief you cling to (even in the face of it being uncomfortable or disprovable). Emotionally, it might be a feeling or love, connection, or belonging to/with someone, something, or someplace (even though you’re not feeling good about it). Spiritually, it might be a belief in the religion your parents raised you in, or a philosophy you cling to (even if it brings you no peace or comfort). Physically, it can be a person, place, or thing that’s incredibly familiar and seemingly stable (even though you would prefer someone or something new and different).

Comfort zone is a misnomer. More accurately, it should be a familiarity zone or a sense-of-stability zone. Yet the disguise is comfort, and a false sense of security that can keep you small, less-than you are worthy of, and otherwise missing out on your true desires for your life experience.

The idea of comfort versus the reality

Many messages about how life should be are colored by exaggeration, embellishment, and notions that are only true for a select few, but not everyone. Believe it or not, you are 1 of 8,000,000,000 people on this planet. All eight billion people do not find comfort or contentment in the same things. Similar, maybe, but the same? No.

Advertising often tells you that if you buy that car, watch, service, or vacation, you will be a winner. You will look good in the eyes of the rest of humankind, be more worthy and deserving. What’s more, not doing so will lessen you.

Does everyone want, need, or desire a Mercedes or a Rolex? Would everyone be better off visiting Hawaii or New Zealand? No matter what you might believe, the answer is no. That’s because what excites you might not excite me, and vice versa. What he thinks is amazing, she might think is awful. What gets them fired up might bore us.

My overall point here is that what’s familiar and comfortable for some isn’t for all. Yet society bombards us with messages about buying, having, doing, and being to look good among one another. The ultimate path to greatness, or so they say, requires you to be comfortable, at ease, and capable of living via rote, routine, and habit alone.

To be fair, that IS sufficient for some people. But not everyone. I, for one, am never comfortable working a standard 9 to 5 office job or playing a conventional sport like tennis. For me, working for myself and setting my own hours, combined with a part-time gig working for someone else and practicing medieval fencing, brings me comfort.

But that doesn’t mean I’m without a false comfort zone to move beyond.

Photo by Iluha Zavaley on UnsplashThe comfort zone might be a lie

Change is the one and only constant in the universe. Fast or slow, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, change is inescapable. Most change happens well outside of your control.

Apart from protesting, boycotting bad businesses, writing blogs, and voting, there’s not a lot you can do about politics and your so-called leaders. You can do nothing about the changes in weather, traffic, that red-flag idiot your friend insists on dating, or your loved one’s sudden and unexpected insistence that the Earth is flat. All of your control lies inside you and your life, your choices, and your decisions.

One of the great truths of the universe, alongside the constancy of change, is that everything grows and evolves or stagnates and dies. That might be harsh, but it’s still the truth. As part of the inevitability of change, people, places, and things grow and evolve or stagnate and die.

My work as an authorpreneur requires me to navigate a constantly shifting and changing landscape. Traditional publishing isn’t what it used to be, but self-publishing is constantly evolving and changing, too. Don’t even get me started on AI and how it impacts everything. The point is that I need to grow and evolve my work or let it stagnate and die.

Likewise, I’ve been doing medieval fencing for over 30 years. And my game changes, grows, and evolves because if it doesn’t, it will stagnate and die. I’ve watched more than one person’s skills stagnate and have seen how miserable that makes them, so I strive not to fall into the same trap.

My point? No comfort zone lasts forever. It must, because change is constant, evolve. For the most part, unfortunately, change is met with fear and resistance over reason and acceptance.

Fear and resistance vs reason and acceptance

The entirety of the MAGA movement and Trump’s popularity is based on fear and resistance to change. They believe in a world that used to be, which they want to go back to, that they better understood (but that, in truth, never actually existed). The GOP and some of the more conservative Dems use fear of change and progress to create resistance and jam up the works.

Nobody teaches anyone how to handle change. They might teach you things to do, but not how to mentally, emotionally, and spiritually deal with it. When I reached 6th grade in the early 1980s, I attended a pilot middle school that had 1 computer per 3 students. Rather than Home Economics, I was taught typing. We were taught to embrace the tech as it was becoming more mainstream, but not how to handle all that these changes would represent.

Maybe had we been taught to apply reason and acceptance, we’d use the tech we have to grow and change rather than distract and expand on confirmation biases. Who knows?

You, however, are empowered to make choices and decisions for yourself. That means you can recognize if your comfort zone is truly comfortable or if it’s a lie. Thus, you can choose and decide to apply active conscious awareness – mindfulness – to change anything that’s not working.

Please keep this in mind – change is seldom, if ever, one and done. What brings your peace and contentment today might not tomorrow. That’s the constancy of change. Today’s comfort zone is tomorrow’s hellscape.

When you apply reason and acceptance rather than fear and resistance, you are empowered. That’s how you can take the wheel and drive your life where you desire it to go.

Is your comfort zone truly comfortable, or is it a lie?

This is the seventh-hundred-twenty-sixth (726) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.

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