Comfort is an innate sense in us. We seek it, of course we seek it. Whether it is coming home to a made bed, your favourite meal, playing a game, drinking a cup of tea, or your partner’s rationalization of your day, we all love to live in comfort, and that is an excellent thing to live in.
What drives us towards this comfort is a sense of security; a safe space in which to exist, a safe space in which to express true nature and happiness, the second point is sometimes overlooked in social situations. How often have you come away from a social situation and thought back to: ‘Why did I say that?’ or ‘What are they going to think of me?’. Could it be that perhaps you didn’t feel comfortable to express your true opinion in that scenario, did you feel social pressure to conform to the situation, or were you struck with a fear of other people’s opinions?
All these things are very common, but they’re self-sabotaging, and they’re not recognising the compromise that you may have perceived to have been placed in.
I think what the self-sabotaging, or self criticizing would be another apt description, comments above relay is that comfort is intricately linked to community; community is a group of people who all feel commonly comfortable in a certain scenario, and therefore act in compassionate and productive ways towards each other. They share world views, they share common interests; common experience.
If that feeling of comfort is not there, often behavioral traits such as isolating yourself, not speaking your mind, or on the other side of the scale acting in a dominating way, can become prevalent.
Let us now consider what happens when we don’t feel comfortable, perhaps you could even imagine what might happen if it was impossible for you to feel comfortable, and people have to experience this all the time. If we are not existing in our comfort zones then there is two other possibilities that we may be experiencing: the learning zone, or the chaos zone.
The learning zone is a place of perceived benefit to the chaos that you’re experiencing; we’ve all been studying for an exam thinking: ‘Why did I sign up for this? I am not having fun, this is not enjoyable’, but you crack on with it because you want the qualification that allows you to start the next chapter of your life. I would also add that the learning zone is a place where we make use of perceived mentors; teachers, to guide us through the pitfalls of this zone, until we are comfortable with the new knowledge enough to guide ourselves.
Mentors are extremely important to this stage of someone’s life, they provide an underlying basis to a changing environment; a vision of the future that you can mold to your own personal adaptation. In life we seek people, or they seek us, who have more experience than we do in a field that we want to learn more from, that is the learning model. A student wants to learn something, the student finds someone with that knowledge who is willing to teach them.
Mentors provide the solid ground of someone who’s life revolves around knowledge that you would also like your life to revolve around, but perhaps you don’t know how yet, or the perception of such a life is overwhelming because you don’t know the required steps in order to get there. The need to find a mentor for someone in the learning zone is strong, and necessary.
Similarly, the need in some to mentor others is strong, and I for one have the type of personality where I need that in my routine. It’s an intuitive need and it’s inherent in our DNA, if you consider the very simple example: parents teaching their children the ways of the world, they’re passing on their outlook and their vision of their family heritage to their children to carry on. They’re passing on their comforts for their children. Now some children find this oppressive and some don’t, but I think that would be a whole other article.
The final zone that you may be existing in is the chaos zone, and just for the record, I hope that you’re not, because it’s rough. Change is chaos, and we all go through change regularly. Our partners, family, and friends support us through this chaos as mentors in the learning zone and, of course, a lot of the time we will reciprocate the favour. Life is full of learning, and if it’s balanced with comfort, it can be the most wonderful of endeavours. However, if somehow you don’t have any mentors to guide you through this chaos, either by physically not having them or being unable to see them and accept their mentorship for some reason, then you’re in trouble.
The emotional stress of not having a community to mentor you through the chaos will result in you experiencing trauma, and if you experience trauma then you’ll need to focus yourself on healing from that trauma.
As I had to when I experienced the Nepal earthquake first hand in 2015. Trauma can really break down an entire life and leave you with none of the pillars of stability that you used to hold onto. However, if you trust that you have a good, pure, person inside you (you have by the way, no matter how much they’re hiding) and you trust that your intuitive sense will guide you in your recovery, alongside active knowledge, then you’ll be able to get yourself out of the chaos zone and started heading back to the learning and then comfort zones — as I said earlier, the perfect combination is to inhabit the comfort zone and dip your toes, or your leg, into the learning zone.
Now if you consider that everyone’s comfort zones are unique to them, and in order to understand someone you’ll need to understand what their comfort zone is. For example, English men are far more uncomfortable with a stranger entering their personal space than Indian men would be. We can assume these generalizations from the practicalities of a culture; India is far more populous per square mile and since the people of India have a different benchmark for personal space, for example it is generally accepted that male friends hold hands. These differences should be celebrated as the spice of variety in the world. Otherwise, it would be a very boring place.
If we don’t pay attention to these differences in comfort zones, coming from the environment that people exist in, then we can expect to experience discomfort between our relationships and in the end, we won’t fully see each other for who we truly are.
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Previously Published on Medium
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