Comfort zones were a topic of focus today.
“That’s why I dance,” he said. “That’s why I sing.”
“It’s not for entertainment, although (as he gesticulates with his washboard straight closed hand poised elbow perfectly pressed business suit) it is entertaining.”
He’s right. It is. There’s something magical about a man who climbs down from the ivory tower to sing his heart out in the basement with the people still looking for ladders.
“It’s about getting out of your comfort zone.”
And I look around, wondering where my comfort zone is.
Because I’m not sure I’ve ever been comfortable.
My life fits like sneakers worn on the wrong feet. Not entirely debilitating, but just awkward enough that my blisters never go away. I don’t have a negative body image but my skin sometimes fits like I left it in the dryer too long, like it’s keeping me from being the graceful creature God intended. Like I’m taking up space I wasn’t supposed to take up.
I’m in the way when I’m looking for my bank card in line at a cash register, I’m awkward about open doors. I’m confidently tripping over most of my own nervous words. I say weird things to total strangers because silence is reserved for winning, and I’m never sure what I’m being sold.
I wonder if it’s the boy who passed me a note in the ninth grade. He folded the words, ‘Will you go to the Homecoming dance with me?’ into this origami heartbeat, evidence that someone saw me. And we went, and we danced. To End of the Road.
We were all temporary, though, the kids I knew. Our existences passed by each other with brutality and abruptness, young relationships at the mercy of the United States government. Maybe we traded in comfort zones for adaptability, because the only thing we could count on was that things would change.
Comfort zones are envious places to me, if it means for a moment you get to just be.
I’m an old metal fan violently oscillating between “I’ll take my life over easy, just this side of comatose” and “hell, yeah. Challenge accepted.” There’s nothing comfortable about wanting to do everything so doing nothing instead, or worse; doing something just because someone said you would never…
I wonder if people with comfort zones are content. Because I have been grateful; I am grateful. I daresay I can be quite happy. But I don’t know all that much about being content. And if life is waiting for you right outside of your comfort zone, then where does contentment wait?
Is contentment the same as skin that fits and shoes that are on the right feet? Is contentment the absence of awkward and out-of-place? Or is it that here’s no such thing as a comfort zone when you don’t know what it means to be comfortable?