Victims of Comfort – III

The title of this post is misleading. (I never wrote the first two parts; they happened here and here). It has been borrowed, without permission.

I recall, when I started learning PhotoShop, I used to make wallpapers for the desktop. Each wallpaper that I created was a portfolio of what I had observed and learned from my fellow artistic colleagues. Each time I learnt something new, people knew — I would have a new wallpaper.

c=k; change is constant

That was one wall paper I had created with all possible bevel and shadow effects on text. And perhaps, one of the few wallpapers that survives from about ten years ago.

Change is something that most of us resist; even if we yearn for it. And I speak of change, rather than the evolving wardrobe or the extension of vocabulary. A major change — whatever you think that is. How many changes do we effect? How many are the changes that are thrust upon us, which we succumb to and then either like or dislike them?

Do we seek that realm of comfort, so that we survive — is it not easier to survive when we know what to expect? How easy or difficult does it become to shake all that we are used to and restart (especially in the same place where we stand today)?

Very, I think.

Growth causes change. And growth is painful, right from your first set of teeth to the recent promotion in your professional or personal life. There is a native memory of that pain, and we often avoid change in anticipation of the growth pains.

Not everybody resists change. Many do, however. And they grow too. Those that display the graph of their fine evolution of growth, are the ones who are the most likely culprits of this resistance. They hoard the incremental changes that they never effected; invited. They are also the most likely to complain of a wickedness in the world or in the changing behaviour of others or be so comfortable that they are oblivious to earthquakes even.

Then there those that effect change. And there is only one way, I believe, that they make the change happen. They embrace it with complete and utter blind trust. Not in the result of what that change may bring, but in the change itself. The complete surrender. Because, there is no such thing as a better tomorrow. Either there is a tomorrow or there isn’t. Your notion of a better tomorrow is your today being recycled and realigned to make you believe that your today is better than yesterday. Take the last thirty days and run through them you will know what I mean.

Tomorrow can either be impregnated with the sameness of all your suspicions, cynicism and scepticism, or it can be the tomorrow that rids you of that sameness that you so despise.

Your call.

• change
• future
• leap
• tomorrow