And then one day you became Comfortable Here

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Alright so like. At some point in your life you might find yourself being Comfortable Here. Frequently, this is an output of meditation practice. It can also come from religious experience. However it happens, there is a click, a moment at which you realize you are no longer fleeing from the present moment. You can just sit there and exist now. Of course, you still want to go and participate in human life, because it’s fun. But the simple urge to act and think is less compulsive, more freely chosen.

The startling thing is, simultaneously, you realize that this wasn’t true before. Your whole life, you were constantly compelled to get away, to run run run. From what? From the gritty bedrock of human experience—the fullness of space, the intensity of feeling, the possibility of death. All of those, you were flailing against, rejecting, constantly, as long as you were alive.

It didn’t seem like that to you, before. It didn’t feel like running. A lot of the fleeing took very creative shapes. Your mind was like one of those North Korean mass games, with all of its little parts forming many beautiful colorful formations, all out of fear. Before you even noticed the existential anxiety, there you were in mental flight, inwardly running with a planned innovation in the next frittata, or a scheme to get laid, or the sudden retrieval of an archived grudge. You were doing whatever you could to not just sit here and face how you are right now. You couldn’t tolerate existence without the decoration of constant mental activity, much less face it all with dignity.

Now you’re less caught up. You have some dignity with it. You still see the existential peril everywhere, the constant uncertainty. It sits in the room, like a lazy cat. And it seems fine, even workable. Weirdly this is a somewhat advanced practice. It takes a lot of time to just be Comfortable Here. For many meditators it comes significantly later than learning how to tap into infinite bliss, which is a normal intermediate ability. Now, sure, infinite bliss is great, definitely to be celebrated. But it doesn’t cure you of the essential anxiety. Because you can have access to infinite bliss while remaining anxious about what’s going to happen, about how you’re going to feel. It takes years, often, before that anxiety resolves into a state of not having to feel any particular way, which is much more freeing.

And you look around, when you’re Comfortable Here, now that you’re more thoroughly plopped into the cinema of it all. Your head stays in the room, you’re not running all the time. And you notice that shockingly few people are Comfortable Here. It’s common among young children in a good mood, or elderly people who aren’t bitter. But it’s very uncommon among adults. Mostly, they’re constantly stressed out, constantly pushing against life rather than gliding across it.

The tragedy of this seems enormous—that we are given this profound gift of consciousness, and by default, we spend our lives objecting to the deal we’ve been given. You can’t help but notice the immensity of this issue. It’s all around you. You could think of it as a disease that afflicts, what, about 90% of adults? It makes you understand why missionary religions get started. So you try to do something about it. You try to bring other people into your bubble of Comfortable Here. Perhaps by making more direct eye contact, or becoming a more involved conversationalist. Perhaps by blogging about spirituality a whole bunch. Maybe you spend a lot of time in subcultures where more people are Comfortable, like hippie circles, and recreational dance environments. It feels lovely and warm to be with other Comfortable human beings.

In short, you become a connection junkie. It’s not bad, or anything, it’s normal. It’s probably an inevitable phase. Of course you want people to share this gift you’ve been given, to understand with you that life isn’t fundamentally a problem. It’s sad, utterly sad, to see how much of adult life is about sleepwalking, in a sense—how much it’s the default to conjure up a constant dream of virtual reality to keep us from being faced with what’s actually going on. All needlessly—what’s going on is fascinating. And it’s astonishing what you witness when you get really sensitive to this, get a really good intuition for how many people are holding in years of emotion they’re not letting out, how many people are doing everything they can to avoid exposing their unguarded being, because they’re not Comfortable Here. It’s most people! It’s written all over their faces and bodies! It’s so strange!

But do you see the trick here? You’re not actually fully Comfortable Here. Not quite yet. If you were, it would be fine for you to be separate from everyone who isn’t Comfortable Here. It would be fine with you that they’re running on their little mental hamster wheel like you were for most of your life. You could let them be that way, and understand that fundamentally, they are no worse, and you are no better. Just different levels of Comfortable. Did you bring about your own Comfort through an act of freely chosen will? You did not, it was grace.

It’s not like you would stop caring about how Comfortable everyone else is. You would wish for them to find peace if they wanted it. You might try to tell them in little ways that they don’t have to do so much fleeing, that the basic facts of the situation are not that bad. Yes—you can call to that little part of them that is already Comfortable, and always has been. Make little modest invitations. You can get good at that, and it’s a wonderful skill. Maybe for a moment, their soft underbelly will wave back at you from underneath the anxiety.

But typically, that will be a brief moment. So if you want to be Comfortable Here, you have to be fine with that little sting you feel when that most human part of people is constantly fleeing from you, like a bird disappearing behind the tree line. That’s the deal, too. That’s what you are invited to be comfortable with.