A friend of mine is taking a big step in her life, leaving her home town and all that is familiar to her. “I’m really scared,” she said to me, “It’s so hard to leave my comfort zone.”
I heard myself saying to her, “Your comfort zone is killing you.” For the next few days, that sentence came alive inside me, and inserted itself into many different situations, local and global. I knew from experience that it would most likely come back home to me, like a boomerang, so that I could live more fully into what is behind the words. It didn’t take long.

We started renovating our house a few years ago, in stages. The most recent stage stopped at the bathroom. We’ve been living for quite a while with a functioning, but quite un-beautiful bathroom. I simply lived with it, resting in the knowledge that my well being does not depend on the state of my bathroom. This spring, however, as work on the bathroom recommenced, my mind started spinning all sorts of fantasies about how great it was going to be when the bathroom was done, how much better everything would be then. I could see, bit by bit, my natural preferences becoming demands– a perfect recipe for suffering. Instead of trying to intervene and change my mind, I just watched this happening, until life, in its wickedly graceful way, intervened. One of the pipes in the wall was dislodged during the work, and for ten days we ended up with no bathroom at all. I felt myself, all of a sudden, thrown into another reality, connected all day long to the millions of people all over our planet who have never had plumbing at all. And comfort, the familiar comfort of having my own bathroom, was nowhere to be found.

Having lived in India for a long time, this way of life was not unknown to me. But even in India, I had always had a working bathroom. For many years I heated water up in a bucket, but I was never in the situation I found myself in this month. The whole scenario felt like a slap in the face, a very loving slap, that helped me see how spoiled we are in our part of the world. When I looked into it more deeply, I saw a sense of entitlement, one that runs so deep I don’t even see it, until something like this happens. The more I allowed myself to be present, the more entitlement revealed itself. And on a deeper level, I saw the entitlement we carry in relationship to both suffering and happiness.

What is this? When I ask about this, from deep in my heart, I find a strange belief that things should really be going my way, that I shouldn’t be deprived, that my basic rights as a human being are undeniable, and that they involve my relationship to ’stuff’ like bathrooms. How can this be? Do I really believe that the universe was designed to suit me? And that if things don’t go my way, that I am entitled to suffer?

This whole view of life feels like something that belongs to a small child, something we could all naturally grow out of, instead of continuing to function at the two year old stage. I had a lovely young neigbor a while ago who demonstrated this way of being to me one afternoon, so perfectly. She was two years old at the time, and she had just had a haircut. I was sitting on my front steps, admiring it, when a breeze came along and started blowing her hair around. A look of great pain darkened her face, and she pointed her finger at me saying “Tell the wind to stop! I don’t want it to blow my hair.” I told her gently, and very clearly, that not only could I not do that for her, but it was never going to happen. She was not persuaded. I’m hoping, now that she is six or so, that the level of her insistence has eased up a bit.

This is what growing up is supposed to be about. But I wonder, really wonder these days, how many of us are really grown up. When I feel entitled to suffer, because I’m not getting what I want, or when I think life should deliver to me whatever I imagine I need for my happiness, how old am I?

I had ten long days to notice that having no bathroom was very inconvenient, way outside of my comfort zone. When I was absolutely honest with myself, I saw that it no impact on my intrinsic well being. This was not something I had to think about-it was quite obvious in the moment. When the pipe was finally fixed, and we had running water again, I felt such gratitude. Entitlement shuts gratitude right down, like a knot in a hose. I made many prayers that week, for all of my fellow human beings who live without running water, and for all of us who think we are entitled to our conditional happiness and our suffering.

One day I was standing at the window, thinking about all of the things in my life right now that are not so easy for me to deal with, opening to the feelings that come up in relation to them. In a moment of clear seeing, it came to me that there is nothing right or wrong with any of these feelings, they are simply irrelevant. What feels relevant is gratitude. Gratitude emerges when the entitlement falls away. It’s not something I can produce, it’s not like a new age affirmation I can grind into my heart. It’s simply who I am, my natural state, when I’m willing to be here, in the utter nakedness and unpredictability of the moment.

I realized that I had confused many things with genuine happiness. When things go my way, I feel relief, sometimes a sense of victory, but not the natural unconditioned happiness of my being, not the gratitude that doesn’t depend on anything.

Do I think I’m even entitled to be alive? Who gives me my next breath? I can’t even ask these questions if comfort is a priority. They are like medicine, like clean water:

“Are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?” (Antonio Machado)

with love
Shayla