Is your comfort zone keeping you from a meaningful life?

What were your hopes and dreams when you were age 10, 20, 30?

Chances are they’ve changed greatly from one decade to the next. After all, as we grow and mature into new stages of our lives, our desires for the future are altered by previous experiences and the realities we face along the way.

I’m reminded of a quote from the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes: “Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon…everything’s different.”

And that’s where I find myself today – everything is different.

My hopes and dreams from age 10, 20, 30 and now almost 40 have evolved over time, and much of what I thought I wanted for the future is no longer true.

I suspect this is from many of the unforeseen changes which have happened in my life recently. It’s those changes I believe which now force me to re-examine where I want to be in the next phase of my life.

It’s ironic actually. I’ve always been afraid of change – shying away from it whenever possible. And yet now I find myself wanting nothing more than to break away from the past and start fresh as the person I am today.

Alan Cohen once wrote, “It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”

“There is no real security in what is no longer meaningful” – and that my dear friends is just the point. We stay in one place, in one relationship, at one job because we believe there’s a sense of security for us. But one day you’ll come to realize that its meaning has vanished from our reality – that we’re just staying put because it’s easier than taking a risk and making a change.

None of us knows how long we have here on earth. We all naively believe that we’ll live perfectly healthy lives well into our 80’s, but time and time again we hear stories of people whose lives have been cut far too short.

It makes you wonder if a life of security is what’s keeping us from experiencing something more meaningful.