Sometimes a creative life means existing in a state of discomfort. Discomfort comes from those times of learning something new, or persisting when a project has become difficult/boring/otherwise annoying, and, in my case, taking the painful but necessary step of no longer drinking coffee.
Pressure to be productive also causes discomfort. I’ve made certain photos available for purchase – now I need to have EVEN MORE photos available. Keep producing, keep working, and keep it all up past the point of sanity or getting enough sleep.
Perfectionism causes a lot of discomfort. I’ve written a book, but every time I read through it, I find something else that needs to be fixed before I can publish it. Because it’s not yet as good as I can possibly make it, the idea of people seeing that I’ve stopped the process and declared the book “good enough” makes me uncomfortable.
Worse, the idea of releasing the book and having it only be “good enough” causes discomfort. No one wants to produce something that’s merely good – amazing, spectacular, life-changing are all much better than simply good. Or so we think.
Aside from quitting coffee, the worst kind of discomfort is the feeling of not having enough time. Strangely, I also find time to be the easiest problem to solve. If the choices are wash the dishes or go take some photos, the dishes will always be the loser (and for that I should definitely apologize to my roommate).
The odd thing that occurs to me about all the things that make me uncomfortable is simply that:
Whoever told people we have to be comfortable all the time?
Why do we treat all forms of discomfort like a major problem? Silence, waiting in lines, traffic, those damn dirty dishes, and the weird contortions I force my body into to get just the right angle for a photo…what makes any of these bad, or wrong, or something to get rid of?
What if discomfort is just another feeling to experience? I get nervous before job interviews and I hate that feeling, but is that a reason to avoid job interviews? Not really.
Rather than treating discomfort as something that I want to go away, lately I’ve been spending time with it. I’ve been exploring how it feels when I do something that makes me uncomfortable.
What I’ve discovered is that the feeling passes. And it passes surprisingly quickly most of the time. So maybe I can declare that book good enough, publish the damn thing, and let other peoples’ opinions be their problem. The alternative being to continue editing it, and before much longer it will no longer remember the story I originally set out to write. By avoiding the short term discomfort, I’m setting myself up for a much longer period of discomfort.
Sometimes the path through life is a course of least discomfort. Instead of doing things that I really want to do, my choice of roads has more to do with avoiding things I don’t want to do. However, as I have realized by giving up my four daily cups of coffee, sometimes the thing I really want to do is on the other side of what I really don’t want to do, also known as the thing that makes me really, really uncomfortable.
What it, instead of stepping aside from discomfort, I were to step into it? Instead of avoiding discomfort, what if I were to embrace it? What might happen then?
I suspect that whatever happens would be good.
