What's that feeling? UNCOMFORTABLE "Uncomfortable-Causing or feeling slight pain or physical discomfort, Causing or feeling unease or awkwardness"
Being uncomfortable is having its peak right about NOW.
Typically, when we feel uncomfortable, we usually DO something. We haven’t really practiced sitting with it, for hours and days and weeks. (As of today that's 4,769 hours, 199 days and 28 weeks since the pandemic changed our lives.)
But here we are.
So how do we DO uncomfortable?
You’ve meditated, walked, binged on food, television and alcohol.
You’ve cleaned, organized, Zoomed, texted and video chatted.
You’ve crafted, played games, walked some more, drank some more.
You've cried, shouted, slept, cursed and laughed.
And it is still so uncomfortable with no sign of letting up.
If in January we could have seen into these days, have been told what was going to happen,
How so many of us would work from home, and too many of us not at all?
How we would stop nearly all travel, school, shopping, and social contact?
How we would manage to re-arrange our entire lives?
It sounds like a total nightmare and an extremely uncomfortable situation that no one would feel prepared to deal with.
We fear we do not have the capacity to manage the worst-case scenarios we dream up or find ourselves in. But then something happens. We may kick and scream in denial, we may fight it every step of the way, we may freeze and feel numb and paralyzed, we may soften, sink and scramble to breathe and make sense of it and all the while we are changing in response to the happening.
We miss this change because we are still focused on fighting, the numbness, the fear. Yet, here we are. Doing it, every day.
If we pause to check in with ourselves, we realize we are arriving and changing with the situation- despite our best efforts to deny, resist and look for blame.
What if we not only acknowledge the fear, the frustrations, the denial, the extremely uncomfortable situation but also the change?
To say:
It might not look how we think it should or thought it would, it might not be pretty or perfect, it might scare us, it might feel weird and strange and like we are barely holding on. This is it-this is how we do "uncomfortable".