The Man in the Black Mercedes

The Comfort Trap: or What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?
by Judith Sills, Ph.D.

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Are you up for a fight?

Because I'm telling you, right up front, it's a fight to get from where you are to what you want. That battle is with yourself.

We are the rocks we are pushing uphill - if and when we choose to make the push. Most of the time we don't. Why not? What makes it such a struggle to push ourselves even when we are pushing ourselves toward something better? It's difficult because, however unsatisfying it is where we are, it is also comfortable.

In the high-wire act that is life, most of our time is spent huddled on a comfortable platform of our own creation. We could stay safely snuggled there - busy, preoccupied, suffering, or delighted. It is a familiar and confining harbor, and its only exit is a tightrope stretched to the next safe haven. Eventually, uncomfortably, the spotlight of promise moves to that next platform and our own grows painful or empty. When it does, we freeze in place. Can we risk that tightrope of change?

What will you do?

Many will look determinedly away from the tightrope. Who knows, after all, where it leads? Some few will fling themselves forward, while others will inch out and back and farther out again, making wobbly, determined progress toward the light. Most will listen as hard to their audience as to their own hearts, drawing courage or caution from the chorus around them. Of those who risk the tightrope, we know for certain some will fall. The rest will make it to a new platform, larger, richer, more satisfying than the old one. They will bring with them both an enduring pride for having made the leap and a degree of pain from their loss of what was left behind. Much of what was left behind were people who were unable or unwilling to make a similar vault. They stayed stuck. What about you?

Frankly, most of us will linger on the platform of our comfort zone forever, unless it collapses beneath us and life forces us onto the tightrope. If it does, we suffer and eventually savor the pleasures of change. But without that push it can be a very long wait for those pleasures - until you get enough money, or meet the right person, or lose the weight; until the kids leave home, or you finally get fired, or your parents die, or your mate leaves you so you don't bear the guilt for doing the leaving. In the meantime, your platform holds and holds you to it, and life becomes a summer rerun, if only because you feel unable to create a brand-new episode.

There are the few who show us a different way, who turn their backs on familiar comfort and rush toward the tightrope with breathtaking confidence, propelled by a passionate conviction. Of course, these people tend to be known as either saints or madmen - Gandhi or Golda Meir, Nelson Mandela or Larry Kramer - and you are probably neither, so what is there to learn from them? We have other contemporary figures who lingered on a comfortable platform of conventional beliefs and then, through some personal epiphany, took a leap across to a higher plane. I think of Oskar Schindler or Rosa Parks or Anwar Sadat as three examples, though you may consider them to be saints or madmen, too.

These are historic figures, legends even, whose stories dramatize deliberate personal change writ large. There are other stories of risk and success that guide us on a more human scale. These people show us how to move forward deliberately, consciously, to expand the platforms of our comfort zone, to stretch that platform bit by bit, always pushing into new territory, gnawing away at our boundaries and opening up our possibilities.

Think of Oprah - not white, not thin, not connected, not cherished, and not letting any of this stop her on her Sherman's march to the microphone. Think of Madonna - who meets every success with the next risk, who often fails and has yet to falter. Hell, think of Scarlett - who saw opportunity in a pair of curtains and postponed her fears until tomorrow, which is when most of us schedule the risk of change. These are people who make life happen, rather than waiting to see what happens.

What about you? Could you step out on that limb, past propriety, past security, past your own familiar sense of yourself? Could you confront the bully, risk the rejection, open the business, leave the marriage, insist on the raise, take up tap dancing, disappoint your father, go back to school, face disapproval, learn to ski at your age, hit on the lifeguard or even the president - assuming you'd want to, of course. Could you break your own boundaries because something you want to have or someone you want to be is on the other side?

I think of the title of a 1950s autobiography, I Leap Over the Wall, when I am working with someone who is longing to change something in his or her life but feels utterly unable to proceed. As I recall, the book told the story of a nun and her struggle to leave the convent, but to me the title suggested the emotional effort so many of us make in our attempt to move life in a positive direction. From the grand inspiration of Meir or Mandela to the merely social aspirations of Wallis Simpson, moving in on the Duke, all leapt over some wall.

The Comfort Trap (or, What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?) is about that wall and how to leap over it when it's standing in your way. It may be the wall in your marriage that prohibits you from saying all the things you'd like to say. It may be the wall that keeps you in a professional pit, soothing yourself by identifying with all the fellow wallowers who are keeping you company. It may be the barrier between you and a physically healthy life, a barrier composed of all your self-destructive, deliciously satisfying impulses. The wall is made of fear and habit, and the energy required to scale it is considerable. The thing is, much of what you want in life is on the other side.

The Comfort Trap (or, What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?) is a guide to wall leaping. The principles of forward motion are the same whether what is on the other side of your personal wall is more money, profound intimacy, a sense of purpose, or a divorce. This is a book about crossing your own boundaries in order to move forward in life.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Judith Sills, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who for the last decade has appeared regularly on such national television shows as Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphaël, and NBC News. She is a contributing editor to Family Circle, the largest-circulation women's magazine in America, and also writes for O, The Oprah Magazine.