Jennifer Louden is known as “The Comfort Queen” and featured on many globally recognised TV shows, including Oprah, with over 800,000 copies of her first book sold internationally. She is the world's leading authority on carving out the time and desire to look after your own well being and hence achieve more with less stress despite having a very busy life.
A friend takes me to an opera. I don't like opera. I go because I like her. Sitting in the darkness, voices entwine my heart, something breaks free in my belly and careens out, showering my body in goose bumps. A new me opens because of what is happening up on that stage.
But Sam I am, I don't like opera. Not in the dark, not in a train, not in the rain.
Here is what I believe: Life is an enormous pu-pu platter, a giant offering of possibilities, and it is up to us to keep sampling the delicious tidbits until we find the ones that make us dance on the table with satisfaction and exultation.
I keep thinking, "What if Beethoven had never encountered a piano?" and "What if I never found out I was gluten intolerant?" Go ahead and shake your heads at this giant incongruity but this is the range of experimentation we need. It isn't just the big things we need to experiment with but (like our life's calling), the little details are equally important, things like the finding the best walking shoes or the right amount of sleep.
How easily we can assume that we are just a particular way or that we are sentenced to live a certain way, forgetting that we can shuffle the deck, juggle the balls, switch horses midstream. How often do we give up on ourselves (or another human being) assuming we have tried everything when the next combination or new possibility is just waiting for us to see it?
Habits can ensnare us in a straitjacket of comfort, reassuring us that we know what we like, we know who we are. It isn't that we just need to "stay open" or "try new things". It is much more critical than that. We need to keep discovering, until the day we die, all the possible ways to do and to be.