Stepping into an ice-cold shower - on purpose - first thing in the morning, is an altogether different experience than one might think:  It's quite a bit worse.  I know this because it's something I've begun to do occasionally.  The stories I read over the months prior to first attempting it, written by the proponents of doing such a ridiculous thing, championed their physical benefits - how they work to increase circulation, energy, concentration, metabolism. Those same articles also said I would find the experience much easier over time.  We'll have to agree to disagree.  If given the choice between clubbing myself in the shins with a tack hammer, or greeting the sun with involuntary muscle contractions and hyperventilation, I would gladly take the hits on any given day.

But honestly, I haven't done it for my health.  Maybe the physical benefits are real, maybe not.  Since I'm not a doctor, scientist or even a particularly smart guy, I'm happy to take the word of those who are one or more of those things at face value.  What I do know, is that I'm so often ashamed of how many times I find myself taking the easy road.  Every single thing we do in the course of our days and months - every step, every thought, every task - is wholly dependent on whether or not we make the conscious choice to do it.  And I make the choice, more often than I like to admit, to stay on the couch.

There are some things for which it seems there is no real decision to be made.  To be sure, the choice is ours as to whether we do them, but we know that regardless of enjoyment, they must be done.  The consequences for not doing them are worse than our loss of comfort.  It's why we go to work when we'd rather stay in bed.  Why we sit up with a sick child, while we are sick ourselves.  Why we'll sacrifice our own financial security to help a family member restore theirs.  While not always being fun, the obviousness of these choices makes them among the easiest we'll make in life.

But we aren't talking here about those things.  For every choice we make for which it seems we have no alternative, we make countless-hundreds more for which the consequences - good or bad - are not immediate.  Maybe not even apparent.  And those, despite seeming insignificant at the time, are really the critical decisions.  The most insidious, precisely because they seem so unimportant.  The most dangerous, even, because it's incredibly easy to take the path of least resistance, and every little decision, when made with an eye toward comfort, cannot help but ultimately lead to a life full of failed goals, thwarted plans and draining self-respect.  All are the result of too much comfort and ease.  Of putting off the difficult things, until one day it is too late.  

They're choices in which the wrong decision even seems to make sense sometimes.  Or at the very least, is easy to rationalize, because the logic contains an element of reason:  "Work smarter, not harder".   "I've lived too many years to have anything to prove anymore".   "There are only so many hours in a day, and I'm going to spend as many of them as possible doing things that make me happy". 

But half-truths are far more dangerous than lies, because however small their truth, it is enough to give us reason to believe.

We gain the greatest strength not through the large, unavoidable choices, but through refusing to avoid the hundreds of littler ones, which are so effortless to ignore.  Because the choices made moment-by-moment - how we will respond to unkind words, how we will offer to help the troubled family, how we choose to encourage or seek or study or learn or risk, are the very choices that govern the larger course of our existence.  And we have a tendency to choose the easiest one every single time.  The most comfortable.  It is in our nature;  a leftover relic of times when self-preservation was a daily concern.  It is much easier, always, to stop, than to continue.  To rest, rather than remain in motion.

There was a time when comfort and ease were a rarity.  A luxury.  Something to be savored, as a time to rejuvenate between the unpleasantries necessary for staying alive.  But today, for most in the western hemisphere, comfort is the end goal, and our prosperity has allowed us to attain it with regularity.  No longer is the American dream a medium-sized house with a picket fence, 2.5 kids, a station wagon and a dog.  It is now unlimited freedom, unlimited travel, alternating weeks at the beach and the mountains.  It is shiny clothes and big phones.  Nice restaurants and unlimited data plans.  Anything less than a leather interior with touch-screen GPS in our new cars, and it seems to us like we're falling behind somehow.  

Comfort has become the status quo.  What should be an understood certainty - helping each other - is now carefully choreographed to maximize our tax benefit.  All the better if our acts of largess and selflessness can be featured on social media for all to see, meticulously-colored with just the right shade of false humility.  "Philanthropy" and "charity" are mainly conveniences now, reserved for adding to our well-rounded image, or limiting the small fragments of guilt we feel, when we see another who doesn't share our place of relaxation and ease.

The frightening part of this - the part that should make us genuinely uncomfortable - is the fact that doing as little as possible is now what brings us pleasure.  Or rather, the avoidance of anything that delays constant pleasure, is now the framework for how we live our days.  To remain insulated, to feel no pain, sadness, boredom...to never face the frustrating tedium of having to think difficult thoughts; to avoid the stress and aching uncertainty of wrestling with our own convictions in order to decide why we even exist...  These have become far more than temptations in our lives:  They have become the purpose.  

And if that is the case; that we as a society now hold the experience of comfort up as the ultimate end of our years on earth, by default, our incentive becomes simply:  Do nothing.  

The great paradox is that society's great misfortune in this is the result of our great fortune.  Our individual comforts have given us the ability to ignore the discomfort of others.   Our blessings, meant to build us up, have softened us.  Meant to strengthen us, they have made us weak.   Instead of making us thankful for what we have, they have caused us to turn inward in a selfish attempt to get more.  Of everything. Comfort included.  

Moving forward has now become exceedingly difficult, because our momentum has stopped.  Too much comfort has become something we must guard against, rather than hope for.  And the avoidance of it requires tremendous force of will.  It requires the re-establishment of goals.  We are objects at rest.  A force must be enacted for us to gain motion.  It is not enough to sit still, hoping passively to avoid excess comfort, because sitting still keeps us in a position where it cannot be avoided.  Sitting still is comfort.  It is terribly necessary now, to establish and keep before us an overarching theme of what we'd like our lives to be about.  Anything else, and the will fails.  Because in the absence of a theme, of a future hope, of a reason...the will always fails.  

In all this talk of avoiding too much comfort, it would seem the solution is simply to force ourselves into motion more often.  But that isn't entirely true.   The theme of our lives should not be achievement, for achievement's sake.  Nor money, for money's sake.  Nor security for security's sake.  These are mirages that we see as substance for only a time.  Until one day, years later, they drop us off unceremoniously, disillusioned and exhausted, exactly where we started:  Once enough achievement, enough money, enough security has been attained to bring a level of comfort that provides us the insulation against disturbing unpleasantries, we find ourselves with the inability to pursue anything other than what we hoped for when we first began.  Our lives become as simple in focus as they are devoid of meaning.  The only goal we've ever had, which can never end, but can never be truly attained, remains the same as it was when we had nothing:  To gain more comfort than we had yesterday.  

Despite conventional wisdom, despite what we're forever being told, despite what seems to even make sense, we can be absolutely certain of one thing:  Goals set with an eye toward our own gain will always ultimately result in disappointment.  Making goals larger than ourselves - outside of ourselves - toward helping others, encouraging others, making society better one brick at a time, is the only way to know for sure our goals will never be too small.  There will never be too much love.  There cannot possibly exist too much kindness.  There will never be a time when selflessness is bettered by selfishness.

Without question, intentionally inviting discomfort into our lives does require us to consistently think about what we're living for.  Why we do what we do.  What we're hoping the end-game will be.  What our tombstones will say.  

I, for one, will consider my life a failure if the following would make sense on mine:  " He pursued success, and by the common definition, attained it.  He had a long boat, a fast car, a tall house, a few bank accounts that never ran dry...and yet here he lies, as dead as everyone lying around him. "

Comfort never brings fulfillment.  Because there can never be enough of it.  Like money, like power, like possessions, the only result of more, is the desire for more still.  I'll always be a fallen person.  Always weak.  Comfort will always be my default.  But as time continues to pass, working on that particular one of my many failures has become important to me.

So is that all it takes, then?  Just turning the knob to the right in the shower occasionally?  Does uncomfortably-cold water make one a stronger person?  One equipped to better look life in the eye and to face difficulty with intent and resolve?  I doubt it.  But it is an interesting reminder of just how difficult it is to choose pain, when relief is no near.  To choose difficulty, when ease is immediate.

My prayers, as I get older, are that I would become a man willing to choose pain for myself, when good cannot come for others without it.  To choose difficulty when it's the wisest direction, and to have the wisdom to know when it is.  To have the courage to choose the higher wall, the thornier path, the colder stream, not merely because they are difficult, but because they must first be crossed to arrive at the true joy in life, on the other side.