How Does Familiarity Breed Contempt?
They say that familiarity breeds contempt. Whether you apply this to a person, a place, or a thing, it tends to ring true.
This is where the comfort zone exists. It is familiarity, it is the known, and it provides us with a sense of ease and contentment. If we get too comfortable, change becomes that much harder. Change is, of course, inevitable.
Familiarity is not necessarily a bad thing. But too much time with the familiar leaves us feeling as if there is something missing. We seek to effect change, and to create a world and life more to our desiring.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are always growing, always evolving. Every single one of us changes, because that is our nature. Because consciousness creates reality, we have the ability to control and direct that change. We can decide the how, and we can create matters as we want them.
In other words, while familiarity breeds contempt, it could be said instead that comfort creates opposition.
This is, I believe, where the desire from within for more comes from. When we know that, while what there is may be comfortable and good, but there can be better…this is that force. Rather than just let life happen however it may, we have the opportunity to take control, and be the driving force for our own life.
All too often we sit back, and just let life happen. But we have the ability to use our consciousness to create reality. We can manifest more. Every one of us is able to choose for ourselves.
Rather than be complacent in the familiarity of our life situation, we can choose to make something more of it. It is up to us to choose to decide what the will be.
Familiarity can be a mask for fear
It often feels easier to do nothing. There are lots of times when the comfort zone feels perfectly fine, thanks. While there are certainly times when it is totally good to chill and relax and enjoy the spoils of life, too long in that place increases our unwillingness to leave it.
Nobody can remain static forever. That’s just not how the universe works. Everyone and everything has evolved, and continues to evolve. When we cease to evolve, that is when we wither and die. This may or may not be literal.
So we each get to choose to live life, or let life live us. Do we assume control or sit in the passenger seat letting our subconscious drive? Yes, there are tons and tons of things happening in the world today which we have no control over. But our own lives, our thoughts, feelings and intentional actions belong to nobody else. Not unless we give them away.
Familiarity is fear disguising itself as something comforting and good. But really, it is that fear of change, concern that we will screw it all up and be worse off than we are, hiding in plain sight. Here and now we have the opportunity and the ability to change our lives how we want to.
I know a lot of people going through a lot of different life-changing situations right now. Personally, I am working on creating some change to my life, and taking steps that I have been resisting for a while. This is not a comfortable place to be in, and it takes a lot of work to stay in the right mindset. But on the other side of our comfort zones we all have amazing lives awaiting us.
Familiarity can be applied to change
This is not something I have ever done before, but I believe that it is totally possible. Rather than resist change, fear change, or fight against it, the challenge is to get familiar with change. What this means is that to truly control some change around here, I need to actively make change happen.
It can be minor – rearrange my desk, alter my routine, do something different with my time. It could be bigger than that – change up my diet and exercise more drastically. Then, it could be huge, like making a change to friends, jobs, home, and other stable and familiar things in your life.
Could familiarity with change breed contempt? In theory, sure…but realistically, no. The reason is because while you get familiar with change, because of its very nature it will shift before it can insinuate itself in the same way that the comfort zones do. Getting comfortable with change simply means it will be easier to embrace when it happens.
More than that, though, when we get familiar with change, we become better at controlling it. At least, the portions that are completely within our ability to be controlled.
Consciousness creates reality. You and I can use this to our advantage, and make our own choices and decisions to build amazing lives for ourselves.
Can you step out of your comfort zones, leave behind the familiar, and create change?
This is the three-hundred forty-seventh entry in my series. These weekly posts are ideas for, and my personal experiences with, walking along the path of life. I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world along the way.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-blog and share.
The first year of Pathwalking, including some expanded ideas, is available here.
After more than 6 years of Pathwalking, I have launched a Patreon to garner support for these works, and more.
