scijessreads

I saw one of those gym banners (the ones with phrases meant to make you work harder) the other day that said “comfort is a slow death, prefer the pain.” The first half of that resonated with me. The second, not as much. Not that I think pain has no use, because as with anything, we can’t appreciate the sweetness without the contrast of the bitter (because then we would have no reference for what sweet really is). But I do take issue with the idea that pain is preferable. And that comfort is necessarily a weakness or a death.

So, I changed up the phrase a bit. Comfort can be a slow death. But as with any living thing, we all do eventually die. Hence, the idea of memento mori.

But, when I think about comfort as a slow death on a deeper level, I come to realize that comfort (which in the case of this banner saying I think means easy more than anything else) on its own is a death of another sort. A death while still living. If we do not seek to challenge ourselves, we can die while still living. If we don’t seek the pain sometimes, the uncomfortable, the challenge, then we don’t know what it means to truly have comfort. If we stay in our boxes and color only inside the lines, we can miss so much of the world around us. Miss so much of just what we could be capable of doing.

Not all of us seek to climb mountains or run companies. Sometimes the cozy and the simple are all that we desire. But even in those “smaller” goals, we can still challenge ourselves. I take this idea of comfort and death and use it to remind myself that, yes, there is an inevitability in death. But that I can control the life that I am currently living. Do I want to feel as if things are already at an end, or do I want to wring every drop out of life along the way?