I spend a lot of time thinking about language. I frequently get hung up on certain words and spend days mulling over how I use that word in conversation, how it makes me feel, what I think it means and what it actually means.
Some words, like “Lavender,” “Fabulous,” and “Exemplary,” make chills run down my spine just from how they sound coming out of someone's mouth, and others completely gross me out, like “Pimple” or “Fingers.” Some words cause me to have extreme visceral reactions; for example, I couldn’t say or even hear the word “Pork” for at least fifteen years just because it sounded awful to my ear.
I hate when people call an evening meal “Supper,” and I believe you should go to jail if you call a carbonated beverage “Pop.” It just sounds weird and wrong, and I don’t like it.
Then there are the words I’ve misunderstood my entire life. Words I thought were bad, almost poisonous, but now I think I’ve had it wrong.
Like “Comfortable”.
When I was younger, I held so much disdain for the word. I thought “Comfortable” meant “Complacent.” I thought it was synonymous with “Lazy” and “Boring.” I felt it was a word that held you captive and pulled you down into the depths of hell. I thought “Comfort” meant “Basic,” “Boring,” and “Unwilling to keep learning.”
Slowly, I’ve realized, long after everyone else, that comfort is scarce. It’s a shooting star, a firefly, something to grasp, keep safe, and wish for. When we are comfortable, we are recovering, stretching, growing, and grounded in our bodies.
If there’s one thing I know to be true, life is relentless, and discomfort is a given. As humans all thrust into an existence none of us asked for, we all have a worn-in relationship with discomfort.
I used to think I had to work tirelessly to live a big life, so I created chaos, thinking it made me important and strong. But the joke was on me. We don’t have to seek out the challenges life will throw at us; they will find us. We don’t have to work to be interesting or to have significant lives. Now I believe that if you spend time truly getting to know yourself, greatness is inevitable.
I’ve learned the hard way over time that solace is not something to stick your nose up at. Finding brief moments of comfort, finding people who make our lives comfortable, is the very thing that makes life tolerable. Comfortable relationships don’t make you stale; they help you to fly.