“There is a middle way between the extremes of indulgence and self-denial, free from sorrow and suffering. This is the way to peace and liberation in this very life.”

While running today I was thinking about where our appetite and tolerance for both comfort and discomfort are born. I have always oscillated between the extremes of each, perhaps unsurprisingly.

When motivated, I’m able to exercise a level of discipline that is rarely witnessed. When I allow myself, I am just as able to drop absolutely everything and rest completely. Despite the pain that’s often involved, I get a deep sense of pleasure and satisfaction from both of these states and I tend to crave either one or the other in any given moment, day, or season.

The spaces that have never appealed to me are those closer to the centre; low level comfort and low level discomfort. It is perhaps understandable that I would rather extreme than low level comfort; I’m sure we all have the same hedonistic inclinations. But to prefer a greater degree of discomfort than something milder, I feel is slightly harder to understand.

Perhaps here, as we often see elsewhere, we seek the familiarity of what we experienced during our formative years. Though I am comfortable with high levels of pain and discomfort – physically or emotionally – and of course we all have our own understanding of what is a ‘high’ level of discomfort; I find being mildly uncomfortable for a prolonged period much harder to tolerate. It is unfamiliar territory that I was never taught to navigate, nor something I have tried to learn for myself until now.

I think that learning to be here is a discipline in and of itself, and one that could be key to success in my pursuits. We know the importance of being uncomfortable if we want to move the needle. Every life coach and so called self help guru tells us to ‘get comfortable with being uncomfortable’. We hear time and time again how important it is to get ‘out of our comfort zone’ if we want to make progress. What we hear less about is the reality of pushing ourselves even further than that; into the terror zone. Whilst this can produce some incredible results, it also puts us at risk of burnout.

Perhaps if I can learn to maintain states of mild discomfort, I can progress sustainably. I suspect that my resistance to such sustainable states are the seemingly more modest results of those efforts. My writing here is itself a perfect example. To show up every day and write, even if I’m tired or uninspired, and risk producing something that isn’t ‘brilliant’ is highly unusual for me. But what good is a phenomenal result, followed by a downward spiral – or more typically – nothing? Maybe the ego really is the enemy, and it’s time to shed yet another layer in the name of continuity, momentum and ultimately progress.