Who doesn’t love those days when everything went as planned beforehand? No unexpected turns, no unexplained mysterious encounters and a simple straightforward day. That exactly means we love being in our comfort zone, the zone where we know when, how and why things happen. But do we always stay in this zone? Not really.
Even the ones that try very hard to stay within this zone encounter something that they’ve never seen or experienced before. We get restless and often stressed when that happens. But can this situation be always unwanted? Or could there be some merit in the exposure to them? Let’s dive in cogently!
If traced back to the time of our beginnings as a baby, up until 7 to 9 months, the baby cries for everything it wants. But then comes the stage, where it slowly learns to crawl. Now the baby can explore the world a bit itself, however at the risk of bruising its delicate palms and knees. And mind you, it still has the weapon of crying with it when needed.
A few months later, the baby eventually learns to walk on its two legs. An endeavour far riskier than crawling, for it, can not only hurt its knees but also its whole body and head. However, at the same time, the possibility to explore the world is at a whole new level. And don’t forget, the baby has not forgotten to cry and get what it wants or crawl and reach places where walking would make it impossible.
The process of evolution does it for babies, which we all were at some point. But what happens after that? Do we always intuitively choose the option of risk, that has the potential to open up the possibilities? Well, certainly not as gradually as crawling to walking. As we grow up, the complexities of tasks increase. The choices to go down a path are more with us than they are with our evolutionary intuition. One thing that remains fairly consistent is either our bumping into an unknown or a new situation or the situations themselves knocking on the doors of our comfort zone.
Wait, what does that mean? So let’s go back to school for a moment. Everyone loves mathematics up until the class that introduces Calculus. The number of students describing mathematics as their favourite subject suddenly drops and many start avoiding the subject itself; “I’ll change my majors accordingly, need to get done with this one time!” Here the calculus knocked on the door; some opened the door while the others jumped out of the window themselves.
This doesn’t limit only to schools. At work, we encounter something completely different that we haven’t before, i.e., we enter the ‘I don’t know’ zone. And if we decide to risk and explore it, it has the potential of opening up newer opportunities. However, we always have the option of not opening the door and hoping that the knocking fades away, staying in our comfort zone.
Isn’t it also the case concerning people? We encounter several people coming from different backgrounds, upbringings & cultures. We have the option of opening the doors to them beyond our prejudices and knowing them. What we do is a choice, to explore, introduce, embrace or stick to the beliefs and thoughts that we possess beforehand.
That’s fine but what lies in the outcomes of these choices? The comfort zone does essentially seem to keep things safe for a while. Let’s go back to the baby that knows to cry and get things. A year passes by and let’s assume that the baby has overridden the evolutionary instinct and can make choices for itself, like us, uhum. The world assumes that it’s only a matter of a few months and eventually it’ll learn to crawl; so all the cries of a baby are duly attended.
Now after 3 years, the baby declared fit by doctors, doesn’t want to crawl or walk as it’s too risky to get its knees bruised or head bumped into a wall and wants to rely on the weapon of crying to get things done; experiences something new. The cries are not being responded to as before and the adult humans are trying to make it deliberately crawl or walk, aka, forced into the zone that it avoided; for its own good!
To sum it up, it’s actually a good idea to deliberately expose yourself to the ‘I don’t know that’ zone regularly to know better about the world and in turn learn better about yourself. The comfort zone that seems deceivingly tranquil, opens up a huge crater that tilts your balance. That can take you a lot more effort to fill it up than it would have been, had you encountered it voluntarily and on time!
