No Comfort in the Comfort Zone

I did write that title correctly.

I actually can’t remember the last time I felt like I was in my comfort zone. This last year has been an interesting one for me. I spent the first four months in Utah going to BYU. Then I went to Alaska for four months to work as a tour bus driver for the cruise ships. Now I am in Nepal for three months doing humanitarian work. Most of my last month will probably be spent in Idaho with family during the Christmas season.

And that’s just this year. I won’t go back any further. There have definitely been plenty of adventures that the other years have solidly claimed as their own. Needless to say though, I haven’t felt super comfortable for a while now.

And yet…. I have.

You’ve probably heard that saying, “There’s no growth in the comfort zone, and there’s no comfort in the growth zone.”

I’m not sure that’s actually true.

While I have definitely been pushed out of my areas of expertise and knowledge and places that I know very well lately, I can’t exactly say that I have been any more uncomfortable then than I have been during some of my previous times of ease. I think I have actually felt more comfortable during the hard, learning phases even than during those easier times in my life.

You know those times. When everything is going exactly right. When you just go through the days one by one and they basically go as you planned them. And when most things around you stay basically the same day after day after ridiculously boring day.

However, times like that don’t seem to happen very often. We praise the world and life when they do though, and wish they would last longer. But they never do. They’re not supposed to. In truth, for me at least, they are incredibly uncomfortable anyway and I am always glad for the relief of their departure.

Why?

God has said that we are Eternal Beings. Eternal first off in the physical sense; we will never truly die. But it also means Eternal in the God-Like Potential sense. We have infinite potential. There is so much that is still untapped within us that we could harness to do good and to become good. There is way more to all of us than anybody seems to realize. Perhaps we would all be frightened if we could truly understand it even in the slightest sense.

The thing is, we will always be most comfortable when we are being who we truly are. When we’re surrounded by things that are who we are, especially things that are buried deepest inside of us.

Including!!! When we are surrounded by our still mostly unharnessed, unimaginable, Eternal potential.

When someone is uncomfortable in their lives, often they will say something like:

“I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t understand.”

Or “It was different than what I knew.”

Perhaps there is still a small amount of unsurety and unsettled feelings during those difficult, growth phases, I’ll grant you that. But is it truly more uncomfortable than being surrounded by everything that you already know?

Your Soul wants to grow. It wants it so terribly bad. It wants to change and fulfill its purposes and abilities and become everything that it’s supposed to become. Laziness or repetition or constant sameness all the time is completely repulsive to it. There should be growth every day in some shape or form. That’s enough to feed its hungry appetite and allow you to go about doing the things that you still have to do.

Like go to work. Change diapers. Take kids to school. Not to say that you can’t have growth in those areas though. There should be growth in all areas. All areas of your life. All areas of who you are. All areas of the world.

So are you really actually comfortable in that so-called comfort area? Or is your soul longing for something else, but we are just too lazy to try? That Natural Man inside each of us is desperately trying to hold some people forever back at the bottom of the mountains of success and achievement.

As are a lot of the socially accepted phrases and teachings in this world. Maybe you should try questioning a lot more things that are told and taught to you. Question your schooling, question your teachers, question this article. I think it’s true. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you don’t believe a word of it in the slightest. That doesn’t hurt my feelings a bit.

But maybe if you’ll actually learn to question things and the very roots they came from, you may start to learn a thing or two that you never even considered to be possible before. New ideas and thoughts will start to flow into your mind. Connections between seemingly insurmountable things will suddenly become clear. There will flow an energy into your soul that you are taking your life and learning into your own hands.

You will take your mind clear out of its “Comfort Zone” and into the comfort zone where it truly belongs. Where growth can actually occur in boundless multitudes.