This may be the number one thing that keeps us from moving towards what we want:
An attempt to build a life that avoid discomfort.
Control vs Capacity
My default mode - it happens without me even realizing it - is to try and engineer a life that doesn’t include the hard parts.
If I optimize enough…
If I earn enough…
If I heal enough…
If I design my life carefully enough…
Then maybe I can create a version of life that only includes the pleasant parts!
It’s not a bad thing. It’s human. Of course we don’t willingly want to feel all that hard shit!
But underneath that impulse are two very different approaches to life:
Control says: “If I manage this well enough, I won’t have to feel this.”
Capacity says: “I can feel this. I can be with this.”
Control tries to eliminate discomfort. Capacity learns how to hold it.
Control shrinks your world. Capacity expands it.
The irony: If you can’t be with something, you are actually controlled by it.
What the Trees Taught Us
In the 1980s, scientists built a massive enclosed ecosystem in Arizona called Biosphere 2. It was designed to test what would be required to sustain life in a perfectly controlled environment - like a future colony on Mars.
Inside the dome, everything was carefully regulated.
The trees grew quickly and beautifully.
And then…they collapsed.
They didn’t know why at first. Why are trees falling over in our perfect environment?
And then they figured it out: There was no wind!
Without wind, the trees never developed deep roots or strong fibers. They grew fast, but fragile. When they reached a certain height, they couldn’t support their own weight.
A life without friction creates fragility. When we try to eliminate discomfort entirely, we don’t become peaceful. We become brittle.
A marriage that can only tolerate harmony becomes fragile.
A parent who eliminates all disappointment produces fragile kids.
A business owner who avoids uncertainty builds a fragile company.
Resilience doesn’t come from control. It comes from exposure.
The Package Deal
When you try to experience only the pleasant half of life, you end up living a half-life.
If you cut off grief, you cut off love.
If you cut off failure, you cut off growth.
If you cut off dependence, you cut off intimacy.
Life is a package deal.
When you try to eliminate vulnerability to gain security, you don’t get security. You get fragility.
When you try to avoid pain to preserve aliveness, you don’t get aliveness. You get numbness.
Fullness is not the absence of pain. It’s the presence of enough inner space to hold pain and joy at the same time.
The Actual Goal
Spiritual maturity isn’t about gaining more control over life. It’s about increasing your capacity to be with life.
Capacity to sit with disappointment…to hold boundaries…to feel uncertainty… to stay present when things get messy.
The size of your life is determined by what you are willing to feel.
If you build your life around avoidance, your world gets smaller and smaller. If you practice capacity, your world expands. Not because life gets easier - but because you become larger than the discomfort inside it.
Life to the fullest doesn’t come from eliminating the hard parts.
It comes from becoming someone who can be with all of it.
What area of your life are you stuck? And what would become possible if you could be with the discomfort?
Here’s a video about about my own (lack of) capacity to let my kids have sugar meltdowns.