The Comfort Zone

When most people are young, they are bright and more clear minded (having much fewer emotional barriers and inhibitions to confuse them).  But as we get older, we accumulate garbage in our psyche.  Each time we do something that creates guilt we’re adding to the garbage (assuming we don’t clean it up).  Then, after many years, the garbage starts to overflow.  This is when we can’t ignore it anymore and we’re compelled to do “something”.  Many people just pursue their escapes that much more zealously (work, alcohol, drugs, religion, aggressions, passiveness, and basically anything out of moderation).  They don’t want to open the “pandoras box” of garbage in their psyches. 

A few, however, will try to understand what is really going on.  We (the few) are searching for a real solution.  Ironically, when we were younger and more clear, and the challenges less severe, it was too easy to ignore and avoid stress, guilt and other garbage.  But now… now we have the motivation to *really* understand ourselves and work with ourselves, but at the cost of so many years of negative conditioning, with so much accumulated garbage to clean up.  The only thing to do is to kick yourself in the butt and clean up whatever it is that is getting you down right now. 

But, here’s where most people will clean up the bare minimum, get some relief, and stop… until next time; again cleaning up the bare minimum, and so on.  This is getting stuck in the “comfort zone”.  It actually ends up being an emotional roller-coaster that goes absolutely nowhere.  Instead of coasting after each success (back down into misery), the boost we get from cleaning up our garbage should be used to seek out and clean up more garbage.  It’s a matter of self-awareness;  of being aware of any negative feeling we have in order to understand why, and to resolve it.  And the more we resolve, the greater the challenges we will become aware of.  It’s always something we don’t want to do.  Something we may think we can’t face.  But that is precisely what makes it so exciting and vital.

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