When I was in High School I ran cross-country, and I can remember one time when I was with a group of four guys running through a neighborhood about two-thirds of the way through a long and familiar run. We were cruising along at a decent pace and as we approached a side street that we needed to cross we saw a car coming down the hill. They had a stop sign and we figured we would get there about the same time so we just kept on running. Then as we crossed the street the car not only missed the stop sign, they failed to see the four runners crossing the street and I was hit on my left side rolling up onto the hood of the car. They weren’t going very fast and they stopped right away without hitting any of my teammates, but I can’t say that I appreciated the experience much at the time. One of my teammates slammed his fists on the hood of the car denting the hood further (after the indent my left hip had made) and we (including me only slightly bruised) ran on leaving the driver with a dented hood and hopefully some thought for watching where they were going. I tell this story because the other day I was out running and came within inches of a repeat (minus the teammates) of the incident in high school. Perhaps it was getting hit once that made me just a bit quicker in recognizing a driver that is not paying attention to my coming, but whatever it was, I managed to dodge at the last minute. I am not sure the driver ever even saw me. My point is not to criticize the two drivers, but instead to make the observation that sometimes we get so comfortable as we are moving along, we miss things and we fail to react. The drivers in both cases had probably driven those roads a hundred times; they were in their comfort zone. They were probably going home or to some place they often go and they were not expecting someone to come running along. They went through their motions of looking left for cars, slowing, but not stopping since there were rarely cars or anyone else around, and then they went on their way. In one case they ran into something that hopefully made them think and at least for a while certainly broke them out of their comfort zone, and in the other they came close, but instead missed things entirely. Both of these are what can happen when we get too comfortable.

The dilemma for us is that we want to be comfortable, we want to have familiar things with familiar people around us, even if we know that we might miss things. Even talking about changes and the possibility that something we are used to might disappear is scary to us. In our lives we can become complacent; accepting things as they are and never really thinking about what else could be. We are moving right along relatively happy, so why should we change things? Maybe we shouldn’t, maybe we should do more of what we are doing, but maybe we have just never really thought about what else we can do because we got so comfortable with what we were doing. The point is to ask the question: “are we too comfortable?” And, are we missing things all together because we are passing by on our old familiar route? There are points at which we run into things and they shake us up a bit and maybe even change the way we do things a little for a while and it’s in those times that things can happen. It’s in the midst of those times that we can get unstuck, we can break free from our paradigms and out of chaos be reborn, or we can return to how we were because we realize it really was good. Often we realize that the best answer is probably somewhere in between those things, but either way we come out better because we were forced to think about things all over again and re-prioritize.