Comfortable in Discomfort?

Discomfort is an opportunity more than it is an obstacle. During the sharing after the meditation practice tonight, one of the participants talked about a metaphor that is often used in Thich Nhat Han's circles, namely that of clouds in the sky. While some people might see the sky as eternally "present" and only in need of "clearing away" the clouds to fully be visible, others maintain that the clouds themselves are not obstacles. This is a hard practice to grasp, since a lot of times, people have a tendency to try to get rid of discomforts in order to achieve a kind of piece of mind. However, this is not necessary; one need only to realize that their thoughts and impressions are only forms of the same mind, in much the same way that clouds are phenomena.
  I think the best way of looking at this might be to recognize that even the worst kind of thoughts one could possibly have are empty and conditioned in nature. Just as they arise in one instant due to conditions preceding it, so it will also pass away in favor of other thoughts and conditions. There is no sense "building a fence" around a cloud to protect oneself from it. Not only will the cloud go away on its own but it cannot be contained by any boundary anyway, so it's a bit futile to try to suppress thoughts altogether.
  Why do we get "snagged" or attached to thoughts? This is more difficult to really understand, but it has to do with creating a subject and an object. As soon as I think there is something to be grasped that is permanent, a "grasper" evolves from it. Often this will happen so imperceptibly that one will hardly even notice when it's happened. But the good thing is that I can go back to this very same phenomena at a later time and be able to see it differently, with new eyes, because there is no self that is grasping and no object to be grasped. In this way, the discomfort itself is illusory, because it is taking the clouds to be permanent when in fact it is not to be grasped.