Becoming Comfortable With Discomfort
“Today is a perfect day for hanging laundry. And the beach! You must go to the beach today.” Héctor, the manager at the newspaper office we are working at this summer, pops in to notify us, wagging his finger good-naturedly at Maya and I.
Why? How do you know? I ask him.
“Because, the winds,” he says simply, shrugging his shoulders.
Ah yes, the winds, I think. Of course.
Nearly every morning we receive a weather report from Héctor, a native Sevillano who lives and breathes his Andalucian culture.
And he is never wrong.
The clear skies, lukewarm waters, and flying sheets dotting the laundry lines of most Sabinillas terraces that day indicated that he just might know what he’s talking about.
After researching these mystical “winds” that seemed to inform his daily decisions, I learned that there are, in fact, three kinds of gales here on the Costa del Sol.
The first is levante, a soggy easterly wind originating in the central Mediterranean that is associated with overcast skies and occasional rain (in other words, not a good day for hanging your whites).
The second is sirocco, an aggressive, suffocating wind whose Saharan origin is notorious for caking cars and homes with a thick layer of red desert dust.
Finally, there is poniente, a welcome wind that serves as the western counterpart to levante and brings warm, dry weather with it — the kind of weather that, as was pointed out, makes for a great beach outing. It is said that if you can see Morocco’s craggy outcroppings in the distance, you know a poniente is blowing through.
Who knew so much could be learned from a simple breeze?
What, to me, looked to be random bouts of good and bad weather, to Héctor and other native Andalucians was a predictable pattern they could read every day the same way they read their newspapers over morning coffee.
It’s a cultural difference I’ve noticed time and time again. As a Mexican citizen who has lived several years in Mexico, Europe, and the U.S., I can’t help but notice how disconnected I feel from my surroundings when I’m in the latter region as compared to the two former. The idea of focusing on myself — my to-do’s, my success, my well-being, my time — often feels like it should be prioritized over pausing and considering the world around me.
But what is it about American culture that has shaped its famously “individualistic” nature? And has it made us more distant from our environment?
A Culture of Comfort
The United States has long been known for being a champion of maximizing convenience, comfort, and efficiency.
A 1999 article by The Independent, written by an American, laments about this particular cultural trait — what he calls a “strange devotion to the idea of assisted ease.”
Pointing to the growing list of American inventions intended to remove the effort from everyday life — escalators, refrigerators, fast food, automatic doors, to name a few — he argues that these and other $19.95 late-night TV solutions often require exacting upkeep and promise inevitable disappointment when they fail to fulfill their publicized functions.
For him, all America has proven is that “the more convenient things supposedly get, the more inconvenient they in fact become.”
In a section of a paper by Alexis de Tocqueville, a French sociologist who visited the United States in 1831, he observes that American “minds are universally preoccupied with meeting the body’s every need and attending to life’s little comforts.”
The chapter is fittingly titled “On the taste for material well-being in America.”
Of course, this is not unique to America.
To put it simply, most developed countries became exactly that because of their drive towards higher standards of living. Tocqueville himself goes on to observe that “Something similar is becoming more and more apparent in Europe” in the next sentence (that part doesn’t get nearly as quoted).
So then, why are we so quick to particularly ascribe this characteristic to the United States?
Well, let’s look at air conditioning for example. While a growing number of homes, shops and offices in Europe are beginning to install A/C, the United States remains at the forefront, using more air conditioning than all other nations combined.
Even the places that have A/C in Europe more often than not prefer to go without using it. To my chagrin, it is the norm at my office: despite leaving every day with the lovely Shiny Sheen of 6 Layers of Sweat rivaling any Fenty Beauty highlighter, my colleagues do not often feel inclined to turn on the tempting white box of salvation that hangs on the wall.
The reasons behind this range from the steadfast belief that the contraption will induce a terrible cold, to the shared understanding that every minute it is on means money and energy lost. I’ve also heard the fear that A/C was invented by a government wishing to release “cocowashing” (brainwashing) chemicals into all of our homes.
Whatever the reasons, it is clear that European countries, despite their generally advanced status, remain far behind their American counterparts when it comes to achieving maximum comfort.
But maybe this isn’t such a bad thing.
Erling Kagge, a fascinating Norwegian explorer/lawyer/publisher/philosopher who was one of the first men to complete the “Three Poles Challenge” — reaching the North Pole, South Pole and Mount Everest on foot — is a huge proponent of embracing discomfort (I mean, clearly).
Namely, through walking.
As he explains in his book, Walking: One Step At A Time, when we rush through life and live at high speed, we lose our ability to be present and process our experiences. He argues that travelling privately, such as in a car, removes us from the “fabric of the community,” insulating us from the world.
Kagge asks us to think, “What would happen if world leaders were forced to take daily walks among the people?”
Walking, to Kagge, represents the meaningful process of working towards a goal; he believes that shortcuts only disappoint because part of the significance of a goal is the struggle necessary to reach it.
As this writer asks, “how much less interesting might summiting Everest be if you could just take an elevator to the top?”
Our time in the south of Spain, though incredible, has been nothing if not uncomfortable.
Non-functioning toilets, leaking A/C’s, broken water heaters, confusing public transportation, and miles of walking in the wrong direction are only a few of the bumps we found on the road to working, living, and travelling in the region.
Nonetheless, being forced to find unknown places, drenched in sweat, meant looking up more.
It meant asking strangers for directions, and, more often than not, meeting fascinating characters who shared tips you can’t get from a travel guide or Google Maps.
It meant problem-solving and interacting with my environment in a way that being cooped up in a comfortable, cool home all day might not.
It meant facing humanity — not from the window of an Uber, but from hours on a bus or on foot.
More importantly, it meant I had to check the Weather App a whole lot more.
