I’d like to suggest a focus for this budding New Year, not because there’s a magic in the clock going from 11:59 on December 31 to 12:00 on January 1, but because any opportunity to pause, reflect, and regroup is one that I welcome, including artificial ones like a New Year on one particular, very popular, calendar.
Here goes: I suggest we focus on productive discomfort in 2024.
Which is to say: We engage in lots of unproductive discomfort, we humans. We do things like…
…agonize over which television or vehicle or spatula to buy…
…work long hours in the hopes of professional progression, the likelihood of which we don’t control…
…become enraged with people who drive too fast or too slow or too close or while sporting bumper stickers we disagree with…
…judge ourselves and judge others and judge ourselves for judging others…
…and so on. We’re really creative in our unproductive discomfort.
Do you see the trends, the implicit definition I’m suggesting of unproductive discomfort?
This discomfort is over things that are out of our control and/or lead us toward disconnection with other humans/our wider world.
Productive discomfort, on the other hand, leads us more fully into our values. It leads us toward connection – with ourselves, each other, and our wider world.
This kind of discomfort, this productive variety, we’re mighty skillful, as a group, of avoiding. Productive discomfort includes things like…
…saying no to foods or activities that conflict with our religious or ethical beliefs or practices…
…having uncomfortable conversations and staying engaged in them – staying in curiosity, openness, and a willingness to be moved…
…looking into the eyes of a stranger – an unhoused person, a person wearing a political hat we don’t like, a person speaking a language we don’t know – and actively working to see an extension of ourselves, someone as fully human, deeply complex, equally wounded as ourselves…
…buying fewer things, less expensive things, different adventures for the sake of distributing money in more values-aligned ways, whether spending more in ethical businesses, donating more to organizations doing work beloved to our hearts, or hanging money directly to other humans…
…and so on. We can become equally creative with productive discomfort, with practice.
I hear you. I’m not great at any of this either. Every bit of practice, though, brings a wave of fulfillment, a sense of possibility of feeling more aligned with myself, my values, my world, one decision at a time.
Except…
…it doesn’t start with a decision.
It starts with noticing ourselves, how discomfort shows up in us, our habitual ways of avoiding it, and what it feels like to just allow the discomfort to be there without having to do anything about it.
It can just be there.
I promise: It won’t stay forever.