Entry #291219, added on 05-19-04 @ 9:33 pm EDT
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| My-18: Rants and Raves | Entry #291219 |
This entry will serve as my official rant. I am venting here about comfort zones and the various ways we tend to procure and cultivate them. Fear and guilt have a lot to do with comfort zones, so if you are satisfied with your comfort zone, then you're not going to be happy with this essay. If, however, you find reasons to question this area in your life, perhaps the wisdom of others quoted herein will be helpful in driving home some thoughts.
In the amount of time it takes for the mind to invent a good excuse, the mind could have created an alternative way of achieving a result - rendering the excuse unnecessary.
I guess that could apply to a lot of things in life. Imagine the potential for success if bridges had been built to unify more places that are separated by water. Imagine if more people used their minds as instruments of creation, instead of processors of other people's details.
Fear and guilt are tools. Tools are neutral instruments that can be used for us or against us. A knife can be used to heal or hurt. A hammer can be used to build or destroy. After enough hurt and anger, people tend to decide not to do anything that causes more pain. That would, of course, include any dream-fulfillment behavior. Alan Alda once was quoted on the matter, "You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself."
In the words of Dr. Rob Gilbert, "It's all right to have butterflies in your stomach. Just get them to fly in formation."
We live in a world filled with people who don't know what they want, but are willing to go through hell to get it.
Mark Twain achieved a great many things in life based on his famous words. "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first."
We are all built for success, but programmed for failure. "Use your weaknesses to aspire to your strengths," Sir Laurence Oliver was quoted once.
The comfort zone is a subject that begs to be discomforted, just by nature of its very name. It should not be a static thing, but a dynamic area. If you're not consciously expanding your comfort zone, it contracts. Bob Dylan once said, "He not busy being born is busy dying."
The comfort zone knows us intimately and hits us at our weakest point. It wouldn't dream of using an excuse we could see through. It takes our greatest aspirations and turns them into agreeable excuses for not bothering to aspire. In relation, to that, William James once said, "A great many people think they are thinking, when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
To expand on that thinking, Henry S. Haskins was quoted as saying, "Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity."
And although driven by the almighty dollar, the success of Malcom Forbes could be summed up in his belief, "If you have a job without aggrivations, you don't really have a job."
So in summation, I quote the all knowing YODA, "Do or do not. There is No Try."
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