The Comfort Zone

When I was fat my primary concern was temporary comfort and this was coming at the cost of my future. Sometimes things are just good enough where you may not be happy but they’re not so bad that you are willing to make the effort to change. I think about that time in my life sometimes and think about how bad it needed to get for me both physically and mentally for it to finally motivate me to change. I had to get out of my comfort zone and get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

The comfort zone is where dreams and ambitions go to die. If there is no challenge at hand then there is nothing to overcome, no reason to learn, and no reason to create. Everything we have to life is the result of a challenge being overcome by someone at some point. I know I used to feel like I was so far behind that no amount of effort would reap worthwhile results, after two years I can say now that is simply not true. It is the hardest at the beginning but there is light at the end of the tunnel if you push ahead and that light is not a train. There were days I wanted nothing more than to give up and play video games but I knew that would only give me the results I had been getting and would make me feel terrible. In life everything moves nothing rests, you can either create or disintegrate. It is like water, as long as water flows it can stay clean but when it is stagnant all kinds of disgusting things can grow in it. I started to make my body move as it was designed to do and began to feel the positive effects within a month, it became easier just to move around, stand, and walk.

Most people go through their lives living out a set of programmed habits and they do not want to change these habits, yet they may want different outcomes for their actions. Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity was doing to same thing over and over but expecting different results. For myself to become a different person I needed to start acting and behaving like the person I wanted to become. I started by creating a goal for my body that I wanted to achieve (that original goal has been far surpassed now). Then I was working with a vision of a new person, the person I wanted to be. That led to the hard part, the part where I had to take action and act out the things that person would do. The old me wanted to stay in the comfort zone and would be a driving force for thoughts like, “it’s too hard” “I’m too tired” “I’ll start tomorrow”. Tomorrow never comes so I continued to fight against myself through these limiting thoughts.

It took a great deal of willpower to get started but I kept going until I broke my body and made it a slave to the mind. Now going to the gym is simply part of my routine and healthy food is just how I regularly eat. It still requires some effort to keep going because I consistently choose to engage in activities that require struggle. It is this eternal struggle that gives life its meaning and makes the good times all that much more enjoyable. Being comfortable is ok to a point however the creative force in life is historically driven by hardship. We don’t look up to people who were handed everything, we look up to those who had to face the tallest mountains in their lives and rose above.

We choose to go to the gym and do these other things not because it is easy but because it is hard!