Whatever It is, Do It Now.

If you want something you’ve never had, then you’ve got to do something you’ve never done.

–Thomas Jefferson–

To All Nerdies who wish to have a different life.

The title of this post may imply otherwise but I am not going to tell you to do whatever it is that you want to do now, because honestly I have no idea what you should or should not do. I put that title just to sound sure when in fact I just want to talk a bit of comfort zone. My thoughts of it might or might not be true, but it’s all I know and can share.

So, feel free to point out my mistakes. Please.

Comfort Zone

Here’s what I think.

Comfort zone could look or feel comfortable. But so could a jail.

If you think about it, in a jail you don’t need to try so hard making money. Because they serve you your food on schedule, you never have to worry how you would afford to get by. And because money is out of your concern, you can put your focus on things that you actually enjoy, like reading books or meditating or other things that probably feel luxurious to us freely strolling citizens. And if your crime is small enough, you’ll actually get more services than punishment in a prison. That’s why homeless elders in Japan would steal something small from a convenience store only so that they can be sent to a jail. It’s strange, but it’s a fact. You can look it up.

On the contrary.

Living outside of a jail freely also means having to make endless choices on a day to day basis which often feels like a suffocating trap.

You know what I’m talking about, you’ve surely been there.

Start from the moment you wake up, there are feels-like-hundreds decisions you need to make in merely a day, like which clothes to wear, what kind of coffee to order, to drive or to ride the bus, to answer emails or to phone your clients first, to scold your staff or to be Zen, to get mad at your husband or to swallow your anger, to abandon your kid or not. No, no, that isn’t right. Yes, I am joking. Of course I am joking! Don’t abandon your children!

But you get what I mean, having to decide on too many options sometimes smothers you. So in the evening, when your spouse lets you off of having to pick what to eat for dinner you feel somewhat relieved. So now you let go your freedom of choosing what you’d eat, yet what you feel is convenient. You feel comfortable of not having to decide.

Here I am by no means telling you what’s good or bad, I am merely stating that from a slightly shifted perspective, even freedom could look like a trap, and even a trap could look like a comfort. The same goes with comfort zone. It could look comfortable or look like a trap, it totally depends on how you see it.

Because freedom does not only mean being able to do whatever you want to do, but it also means being able not to do whatever you don’t want to do.

Freedom is the power to choose our own chains.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Another thing.

Comfort zone feels especially comfortable when you look outside and find out that it’s a jungle out there.

If you’re behind bars, and over the bars is a jungle full of wild animals ready to attack and to devour you, your prison will surely look more like a sanctuary than a confinement.

I think that’s why comfort zone is so hard to leave. Because it’s so familiar inside and from inside, outside looks frigging dangerous.

People are afraid of anything unknown. When we don’t know about one thing, we automatically imagine the worst of it. And that’s just instinctive.

The thing is, consider what Ajahn Brahm said in his book: Mindfulness, that the thoughts that you have about your past (and your present) are only distorted thinking. Most often than not, the past (and the present) is not like what you think at all.

Maybe, the space that looks like a wild jungle in your head could actually turn out to be the one place that you’ve been dreaming to go to all along.

The reality is you would never know if it’s a jungle or if it’s Eden outside until you’re there. So get out, or don’t, whatever you want.

But.