On Being Uncomfortable
Being uncomfortable is the signal something must change before a greater trouble arrives.
We are lucky to be uncomfortable.
There are certain unescapable aspects of the natural world that are uncontrovertibly a part of our human existence.
Being uncomfortable is the signal something must change before a greater trouble arrives.
Suffering extremes, even mild ones, is a survival signal. No human needs a Ph.D. in biological sciences to know when conditions present a threat to life, we have that encoded in our DNA from before we used to chase mastodons for dinner.
Being uncomfortable is the natural alarm that allows us to change our circumstances before it is too late.
The fact is that humans cannot appreciate the penetrating, healing, restorative warmth of an open fire unless they have faced a numbing and uncomfortable cold.
C.S. Lewis advanced this line of thought when he noted people cannot understand what it means to be bad unless they have tried to be good. Lewis wrote:
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”
Several years ago, I wrote about how, as I sat by a firepit on a restaurant deck on a cool late fall evening, I was reminded of one of my favorite things to do as a kid – to sit by a campfire and to simply stare into the flames.
The dancing flames have different effects on different people but for me, they comfort me and put me in a contemplative mood. Maybe it was the wine or some of the best baked veal tortellini I have ever had but I started to muse about just how good we have it today, how much change for the better I have seen in just my lifetime, how much I really love my life, how much I want the same for my family and others, and how much I want to (and will) fight to keep it that way.
There are of course, many reasons to be negative about our contemporary times – a culture so politically correct as to have forgotten the difference between a penis and a vagina, a culture that has become so self-loathing as to be self-destructive, a global war on terror that our current president seems intent on losing and a rising generation of idiotic, Bernie Sanders supporting, postmodernist drones starring in an off-off-off-Broadway production of “Springtime for Hugo Chavez” to name a few.
To borrow an idiom from James Taranto from when he helmed the elegantly subversive column in the Wall Street Journal, The Best of the Web Today, often times “Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control.”
I wrote about a train of thought I was considering about how civilizations rise and fall. It was not one of my most hopeful trains of thought. I wrote:
I’ve been reading a lot lately about ancient civilizations and how many seem to have just disappeared…vanished without a trace. A true fallacy is to believe that everything around us now, everything we enjoy, is somehow fixed in permanence.
There is evidence of technologically advanced civilizations, the technologies of which we cannot explain today, so it appears that technology is not an effective hedge against destruction. Personally, I think the serial destruction of the past is likely a precursor of our future – and that is likely a future of self-destruction, a turn towards the three facets illogic Orwell warned us of: 1) War is Peace; 2) Freedom is Slavery; and 3) Ignorance is Strength.
Western civilization is on a path to destroy itself and return to savagery to start it all over again. There are no end-times, we only reset every several thousand years so that humans can be reminded of what true reality looks like.
Yeah. Not really something they print on the side of a Girl Scout cookie box or stash in a fortune cookie, is it?
But then the flames from the fire pit slowly seduced me into a more positive frame of mind. It was that any decline is a choice – we have the power to stop it – even if history is apparently not on our side. Civilizations in ascendance survive, those in retrograde do not. The signs of regression are all around us – but the answer is in there – WE HAVE A CHOICE. History is not necessarily predictive; we change our personal history every day for better or worse through our own individual choices.
Milton Friedman said:
“Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.”
We must stop this concentration, no matter the party or person we support – or if we support none of them.
If you are feeling discomfort, there is a reason.
Just because we elect this or that politician, it does not change our ability to act or not act as individuals. Sometimes knowing when not to do something is more powerful than doing a thing. I think it was also Friedman who said, “Society doesn’t have values. People have values.”
We should act accordingly.
To borrow from "The Terminator", there is no fate but what we make for ourselves.