I have this image in my head of being stuck in a remote place that has almost all the amenities to live a comfortable life and what's missing is only what you don't know is missing.
I like to discover new possibilities that light up aspects of my brain to become aware of potential realities that I may not even consider existed.
This unknown territory of knowing what you don't know is as exhilarating as it is terrifying, in both good ways and bad.
The bad is mainly in the lack of preparation to minimise the impact when eventually the unknown crashes into your carefully constructed reality, bringing disruption you never saw coming.
Comfort is a drug, it is well known. There's a sinking effect with prolonged comfort that gets so insidiously strong that any element of resistance is like an uphill battle that you'll likely lose than succeed at.
I actually think it is by design that comfort breeds complacency, since our nervous systems are wired to conserve energy and avoid unnecessary struggle.
The Great Wall Between Here and There
Being stuck in your corner of reality living out your days with predictable rhythms and familiar faces creates a kind of existential background noise.
I mean, as humans, there needs to be an element of friction to realize that we're "stuck", and usually desires are one of the main contributors to creating friction.
I want to climb the Great Wall of China. The reality is China is thousands of miles away. I'd have to go through all the logistics of taking this body to China. The friction between desire and reality creates the awareness and the gap itself is a mirror showing us where we are versus where we want to be.
Now, aspects of the self convene to do cost-benefit analyses about how much of the outcome is worth the effort and vice versa. Interestingly, the final decision is very rarely a consensus, one aspect over powers the others by sheer force of emotional intensity, timing, or the loudness of its voice in that particular moment.
So much can depend on so little. On which part of you happens to be speaking when the decision gets made, whether you're tired or energized and what story you're telling yourself that day about who you are, etc.
The Umbrella Question
I don't think it's far fetched to say that desires have an inherent fleeting aspect to them. For the vast majority, whether they're realized or not, it doesn't ultimately matter as much as we think it will in the moment of wanting.
A mental image here is getting wet in the rain, then sunlight comes and dries it up, then it rains and you get all wet again, the sunlight comes again dries it up and you get well all over again when the rain comes back again.
Might need to really find what the umbrella will be in this metaphor of cyclical discomfort and just stop getting wet when it rains.
But then complication of sorts will probably ensue, it is not known whether getting wet is at all bad even though it's undesirable.
Maybe the wetness is proof we're still exposed to the elements and alive to experience.
Once you have an umbrella, will the precious sunlight no longer reach you? Is that good or bad?
Good, bad, for the most part are subjective experiences based on how something makes us feel.
It is just that as humans we're poor at creating balances and never quite learn from our mistakes unless the consequences become too severe to ignore, and even then we have remarkable capacities for rationalization and forgetting.
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