Dis comfort.
Last month I had my hips replaced; both of them. While there was plenty about the experience I expected would be difficult, I was still surprised by the unrelenting, around the clock discomfort. Pain, swelling, awkwardness, sleeplessness, the indignity of needing help with ordinary and (hitherto) personal functions…none of it was pleasant.
But here’s the thing. The discomfort wasn’t the worst part. Often, what made it worse was the thought that I should be comfortable. Why couldn’t I find a position that didn’t hurt? I can’t sleep like this (turns out I can)! Vomiting again? Really? All the thoughts that this is wrong. But it wasn’t wrong.
Once I stopped fighting it, something changed. I began to think of the discomfort not as something being wrong, but part of healing. My body had been through one hell of a shock, and it wasn’t over yet. Of course it was uncomfortable. When I accepted that and even embraced it as the price of getting more mobile things became easier right away. Just a little shift in the story I was telling myself produced almost immediate relief. At least I didn’t have to try to get comfortable… and then little increments of improvement started to show themselves, and I was able to feel grateful for them.
Everyone has to experience discomfort sometimes. Yet I suspect much of the suffering we associate with discomfort comes from our fear of it, or from the conviction that we ought to be able to make it go away.
There is a paradox here well known to any psychologist worth their fancy couch. The more comfortable our lives become, the pickier we get about comfort. The temperature must be just right. The chair must be right (I call this ‘musterbation’; we all do it but face it, you’re screwing yourself). I must not ever be offended. We need the right food, the right pillow, the right amount of noise, the right amount of stimulation, no disagreement. Comfort, once an occasional rest, quietly becomes the expected default. Our comfort zone shrinks and then, ironically, any comfort at all becomes almost impossible.
If we get to choose some discomforts, we are lucky indeed! But we do need to choose some things that take us outside our comfort zone on a regular basis. Exercise that is a little harder. Conversations we’d rather avoid. Learning something we’ll fail at for a while. Travelling somewhere unfamiliar. Going without some convenience simply to remind ourselves that inconvenience is survivable. Many religious and martial traditions build these in – Lent, pilgrimages, Ramadan, and many more, and for good reason.
The idea that comfort can be dangerously seductive didn’t begin with the internet, although the ‘present day lotus’ that is social media is depressingly good at delivering effortless distraction and easy dopamine. It also presents others’ lives as all pleasure with the crap bits cut out, leading us to think we’re the only one’s who ever struggle. Spoiler – nope.
Just before my surgery my family and I visited Busselton to see the film Odysseus. I was reminded how Homer’s The Odyssey is concerned with this very thing. Odysseus survives monsters, storms, shipwrecks and war. Yet one of the greatest threats to his journey is not terror but comfort. On Calypso’s beautiful island, he is offered an existence free from the struggle of returning home – and the beautiful Calypso. Elsewhere, the Lotus-Eaters offer forgetfulness: eat the lotus (or log on!) and you no longer care about the journey at all. The Cyclops couldn’t stop Odysseus. Scylla and Charybdis couldn’t. But comfort very nearly did.
Our popular stories are full of versions of the same warning. Labyrinth offers Sarah seductive distractions that make her forget she is trying to save her little brother. The Matrix asks whether we would prefer an uncomfortable truth or comfortable illusion. In Hansel and Gretel, a house made of sweets disguises a terrible evil.
Again and again, the hero’s task is to resist the invitation to stop striving and fall into a comfortable apathy from which they never fully awake.
That matters because almost everything worthwhile asks something uncomfortable of us. If we want to improve our mental or physical health, have an adventure, repair a relationship, create, change careers or our community, learn, love, or pursue a dream, we have to accept doing so will necessarily be less comfortable than letting the opportunity slip. And after all that discomfort, the outcome remains uncertain. Ships in harbour rarely founder it’s true, but it’s equally true that’s not what ships are for.
So perhaps wishing someone a comfortable life is not the kindness it seems. I certainly don’t think it is the same as a good life.
Instead, I wish you many uncomfortable days. I wish you challenges large enough to frighten the hell out of you, journeys whose outcomes you cannot guarantee, and the courage not to mistake discomfort for a sign you should turn back. Click below to read my favourite poem on the topic – Cavafy says it better than I ever will.
May you encounter your own Cyclops, your own storms and your own seductive islands — and keep travelling trough them to new harbours and great adventures.
On your own road to your Ithaka.
