What most of us seek is comfort, a warm place to be, food in our belly, clothes, and a comfortable seat.
Once we get that, we want to be entertained, and then we want our food delivered to the door, and then we want to be able to have a beer, maybe 1 or 2, and then maybe 2 or 3 nights a week and then maybe more.
We want to see our friends at the weekends and go for dinner. We want to lie in, not get up too early because we're tired, stiff, and sore. When we get up, we want to creak around the kitchen, make a coffee, sit down, consider our navels for a little while, and look at the view before we get going, dragging ourselves to work to make enough money to be comfortable.
If we get the chance to work from home, then it gets even better, doesn't it, because we can get even more comfortable working on the sofa with a dog on your knee or generally just relaxing as you're working, pretending that you're using your brain really hard and that's where the value is.
But there is a crisis in that, isn't there? But it's slow and insipid, and it seeps over time.
There was a time not too far, not too long ago, when I used to hurt myself on a bike, understanding that the advantage of hurting yourself on a bike was that you would be better in a week or 2 or 3 or a month.
There was a time when it was easier for me to watch what I was eating so that I could just come off all of the things that were 'bad' and live a bit like a monk (I used to call it being 'on the razor') so that I could drop my weight, be faster on the bike and be healthier but it gets harder as you get comfortable and the more comfortable you get, the harder and the more painful it is to deliberately make yourself uncomfortable.
This, of course, is one of the usual metaphors that you find on this blog, but the problem is that that happens across our life, and so the fewer risks we take, the less we stretch ourselves, and the less we go from home, further afield and farther away, the less we put ourselves in the position of stress or distress, or even just disorientation, the less we're able to do that.
Our brain shrinks a little bit, and our ability to take a risk shrinks a little bit, but it's all slow and gradual until it isn't.
Yet again, it's one of those things about going bankrupt, like I talked about the other day, gradually, gradually, then suddenly.
Suddenly, we wake up and think, "Oh, I'm comfortable, but goodness, what has it cost me to be comfortable?"
Blog Post Number - 4139
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