Most meaningful joke in the world
A famous joke illustrates how our comfort zones can block us
I first heard this from the educator, John-Roger of MSIA.org.
One dark night a policeman is walking his beat and comes across a drunk frantically searching for something on the ground. The drunk is half naked, wearing his shirt, jacket and hat but missing his pants, shoes and socks. He is scrambling around on his hands and knees, in the circle of light under a street lamp.
The policeman looks on the ground in the light and can see there is nothing to be found there. “What are you looking for?”
“Well, Officer, I can’t find my keys.”
“Do you remember where you saw them last?” The drunk points across the street to a dark overgrown area of bushes.
“I lost them over there, Officer.”
“Then why are you looking for them over here?”
“Well Officer — over here — the light’s better.”
Our familiar comfort zones are the “light” to Conscious Self, where we trust and believe things are safe, trustable and predictable. Our comfort zones are the most “lighted” places in our psyche.
The converse is also true. The further away and outside of our comfort zones, the more unsafe, untrustworthy and unpredictable life feels to us.
An immature — or drunk — individual wishes to find all his or her answers to Life’s problems only within our cozy, warm little psychic nest. We don’t wanna leave the nest; we don’t wanna leave home base. We don’ wanna go out into the cold and dark, where many problems can only be resolved by thinking outside our life of sameness, familiarity and predictability.
This is how our child within, our Habit Body thinks.
If we are looking for something not present, it’s for darn sure NOT nearby, within arm’s reach, NOT in our comfort zones, no matter how much we wish it wasn’t so.
The drunk wants his solution to be inside his lighted zone, where he can find things easily. He’s not feeling strong enuf to put on shoes, coat, hat, gloves, borrow a flashlight; and, go out into the dark bushes where his keys wait for him.
The pattern of wanting our solutions to be where they are easy to find, occurs when our comfort zones overpower our willingness to learn and transform in the direction of our goals and projects. The human experience invites us to S-T-R-E-T-C-H, to go beyond our comfy places, to consider which reasonable risks are worth taking.
In the 1980s, NLP put it this way: If we want different results, and we continue getting the SAME results, keep changing your behavior until the response we want arrives. Anyone wishing different results tomorrow, must change from how things were done yesterday.
What happens? Often give up on our healthy goals and projects when we have exhausted the resources-solutions immediately around us. Solutions to many of our problems lie outside what felt comfortable and familiar yesterday.
To Learn More
Your Habit Body; An Owner’s Manual: Gut-brain Axis 2.0
