That's what urban life strives to achieve. Air conditioners, heaters, soft bed linen, geysers, cooked food that's not too hard and not too soft. Mobility must involve going not too fast and not too slow, to places that are not too far and not too near. We want to work not too hard and not too little. There's no question that it's nice to be dry when it's wet outside, or warm when it's cold outside, or eat when you're hungry.
But being too eager to be comfortable can turn you into a bit of a softie, even if you aren't physically decrepit. It can turn you into a person for whom, paradoxically, the natural world seems to exist outside of the Goldilocks zone. This process is usually not physical, but mental. It just seems too hot, or too cold, or too far, or too soon, or too hard, to bother.
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This is a real shame, because there is a lot to be said for an occasional brush with the elements. Few such brushes are ever unmediated anymore - at the least you're likely to be clothed - but they're worth doing all the same. Just to keep your brain and spirit limber, it's a good thing to step outside your comfort zone once in a while.
An excellent way to do this is to tear up your ticket to Rome or Tokyo or London or Goa, and get into your car and drive to the mountains - say, Himachal Pradesh. Just the drive should toughen you up a bit. But also, this is how you end up on top of a hill in Shimla unpacking marinated chicken to barbeque when lightning flashes and thunder roars, and the waters open upon your sorry head, which forgot to pack any kind of rain gear. You press up against a wall of a locked cottage nearby under its tiny eave, drinking Jack Daniel's and laughing until the rain stops. When the rain finally stops, you crouch over a nest of stones for an hour, nursing a fire of damp wood both to cook and to keep warm, under a blazing encrustation of stars. You unzip the guitars when the fire finally takes, which is why eating escapes your mind, which is why you have a little trouble remembering how you actually got off the mountain. It is epic.
This is how you learn how much you like being alive, when passing a truck the size of a house on a road the width of a living room carpet, on a blind curve, on the side of the sheer drop to the brown roiling Sutlej river.
This is how you find yourself in an old Kullu-style house of wood and stone beside the pretty, trout-rich Tirthan river. You have to walk for eight minutes from the car park, carrying your luggage, to get there, crossing the river on a footbridge. If you forgot something in the car, it will cost you a quarter of an hour. A trapdoor connects the ground floor and the balcony. Then a storm brews, the power goes off, and you sit on the balcony in a mountain cleft so dark that you can't see your hand in front of your face, with ringside seats to an apocalyptic sound-and-light show. Sheets of lightning behind the clouds look like the birth pangs of some alien gaseous planet. Headlights from the odd passing car light up rampant slopes in a ghostly moaning of light. You can do nothing but watch the elements do their thing, while fireflies connect invisible dots around you.
This is how, when a hairy black spider the size and thickness of your hand takes a stroll on the side of your commode, you go anyway, because you have to go, and because it beats going in the orchard, which is filled with nettles, scorpions and snakes.
This is how, when you find yourself having a severe allergic reaction to something in your food in a restaurant on the banks of the beautiful, abundant Parvati river, you keep calm and carry on because the kind-eyed stoners on the mountainside help you just chill, man. You walk a kilometre up to the terrace of somebody's house and on the last few steps you stop and gape as you come nose to nose with the snows of the high Himalayas, the big daddies far, far above the sharp green mountains here.
Your comfort zone, by design, limits experience and therefore joy. In other words, no pain, no gain.