Your happiness comes down to two fundamental attitudes towards life.
Are you going to seek comfort or are you willing to embracing change?
Change is difficult. It is an ever-ending journey. A perpetual change that comes in little and big waves. Creates upheaval. Creates uncertainty. At least for a while, anyway.
Comfort and change are two fundamentally different, but equally demanding task masters.
Comfort promises you stability and certainty. Comfort creates a warning system and protects you against the ugliness of change. It promises a bountiful retirement, a reliable pension plan, and timely assurance.
None of which it can really deliver.
You can’t fight change. You can’t fight progress. You cannot cheat life, by ignoring living and the inevitability of death.
Change makes a promise too.
It promises you that you’ll be fine. It tells you that if you leap, you’ll be better than fine. You’ll be stronger and happier. Change promises an uncertain future that is better than your comfortable present.
With comfort, you pay on the back end, when you retire and find yourself too tired or too sick to do the things you promised yourself you would do when you had the time. You will pay on the back end when you realize that the world you lived in and loved is gone. You will pay dearly, when you conclude that the world you planned for simply doesn’t exist.
Change on the other hand, asks for you to pay upfront. It demands uncertainty, adaptability, faith, hope, tenacity, courage, and patience. For a little while.
It makes no promises about the future, except in soft whispers that you will certainly like what you will one day see and who you’ll become.
Change connects you to your authentically human self. If you took some time to look around once in a while, we would realize, that the only certainty is change itself.
You cannot step into the same river twice.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Comfort puts you in debt. It mortgages your life. It is like a heavy loaded, unpaid credit card. It promises wealth and happiness, but continuously ruins your credit and sends you to pay day loan centres, so you can party on the weekend.
Change is the currency of life.
The means with which you exchange your efforts for your dreams.
You work hard. You earn your daily bread. You create something. You share that meaningful something with the world. You get paid and rewarded for your art. If you don’t, it’s because you failed, or perhaps no one took the time to look or listen. You stop and examine which. You adjust. You create again, and again, and again.
If learn to share your talents long enough and consistently enough, you will become happy. Life, in turn, will take care of everything else.
Comfort is a trap.
It is a materialistic evil that strips us of our humanity.
Everything in our society is bureaucratically structured to make us normal. We come close in losing our soul in order to survive the twelve years of public education. We get swept up in the post-secondary education stupor, and blindly continue the madness, at our own expense.
We get married. We get divorced. We jump in and out of cottages and meaningless affairs.
We buy bigger, faster, stronger.
Worse.
Everyone we meet and know suffer a version of the same melancholic madness. They are all very eager to tell us that we should really take it easy. We should relax and unwind. There is really no reason why we should try so hard.
We are all immersed and swept up by the current of comfort.
We are drowning in materialism.
What we need is change.
Hard work, an open heart, a leap forward, and some change.
(The pun is intended).
