Insecurity and Comfort – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

"Security is the easy road"

Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

"Security is the easy road." For probably the last 20 years I’ve often heard the phrase "get out of your comfort zone." I’ve seen all kinds of models explaining it and all kinds of analogies, like "diamonds are formed through time and pressure." Yet I’d never found a definition that pinned down what the comfort zone is, until I came across "security is the easy road." So I figured there must be a hard road too. But what is the hard road, really, and why are we so afraid of "getting out of our comfort zone"? As Marcus Aurelius writes in his Meditations, "…or was I made for this? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?"

Our time is limited, and every day takes one day off our lives. Comfort solves the immediate. Steady, persistent work guided by purpose solves the future, a future we can imagine and build. So how do we fall for the immediate? Through that longing for security, where time gets spent. When we’re guided by our purpose, no road is both easy and safe. Life has one thing in common for all of us: constant insecurity. I don’t mean physical danger to our safety, although that’s real too. I mean that we can’t predict the future. That insecurity forces us to reflect on why we’re on this earth, to clarify a personal north and to bring order to chaos.

Order and chaos surround us, like it or not, and what’s in our hands is to consciously decide where we stand between them. A comfort zone may be one remedy for bringing order to chaos. Yet once we know our purpose clearly, chaos loses its meaning. It loses power as long as we stay close to our purpose, and regains force when we drift away. The biggest challenges don’t get solved with more chaos. They get solved by bringing focus and order to our ideas, a north to what we want to achieve and meaning to what we’re willing to do.

Every step off the path we’ve laid out is a wasted resource. We lose our north when we make room for the comfort zone, when we give in to the easy road, when we consciously make the wrong decision. Outside us there are all kinds of tools for moving forward, but only one for truly taking control: our purpose. When we put what’s outside ahead of what’s inside, we’re very likely to start down the easy road. It’s easier to do what others do, to imitate and copy, to be led by impressions. The hard part is to reason and find a way to stand firm in our purpose.

The eagle’s eye, the perspective we need to see life, has many angles. Only one tells us what our next step should be: the one guided by purpose.

Warm regards and all the best,

• Rodrigo Baccaro
• P.S. "As soon as you focus on the right questions, you’ll start finding the right answers" Mariano Ryan, during the final between Djokovic and Kyrgios

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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