The Value of Being Uncomfortable

'Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least,' Georgia O'Keeffe, impoverished and solitary in the desert, wrote in considering limitation, creativity, and setting priorities as she was about to revolutionize art while the world was crumbling into its first global war. There are echoes of Stoicism, of Buddhism, of every monastic tradition in O'Keeffes core insight -- that only in the absence of our habitual comforts, without all the ways in which we ordinarily cushion against the hard facts of our own nature and our mortality, do we befriend ourselves and discover what is most alive in us. The contrast, uncomfortable at first, even painful, becomes a clarifying force. Without the superfluous, the essential is revealed.

Read Article