Everyone’s comfort zone is different.
What makes one person comfortable might make another uncomfortable. And given that you will never know for sure whether anything you do lies within or without the comfort zone of somebody else, you can never really blame yourself for how people feel.
Rather than making wild guesses of where their boundaries lie, just ask.
Ask yourself where your boundaries lie.
And then cross them. Once every while. In many ways, becoming a fuller human being is a lot like doing exercise. If you start exercising everyday after having a routine of zero fitness regimes, you will exhaust yourself. No new habits will be sustained. In other words, you will need breaks.
Breaks are for recovery; recovery from tension. It is this tension that comes whenever your comfort zone is stretched. The goal is not to stretch it till it snaps and breaks, but to ease it into a wider area.
Your comfort zone will never be able to completely overlap with someone else’s, but it can always grow.
Just because a sizeable number of people you know seem to be doing one thing or another, you are not obligated to do the same as them.
Why? For one, because that would be romantically boring. For another, because if everyone — including you — ends up in the same kind of position, playing the same kinds of roles, what would there be to give back other than identical identities?
Not everyone has a choice to make, but if you do, consider yourself unfortunate; with choice comes uncertainty.
The knowledge that something might be better somewhere and worse someplace else never goes away. It is a gift, a curse, and a power all at the same time. The power of this knowledge — the power of comparison — is nothing new. However, it often goes untouched and underutilised. If it is used, more often than not it is for a malicious purpose, such as to evoke guilt in the heart of an ignorant innocent.
To exploit the power of comparison to its fullest potential, you must share it.
Sharing is not so much caring as it is testing and experimenting.
You share and you see the reaction that it gets. You judge the reaction and begin to formulate an updated opinion of whomever that reaction came from. Finally, you set a benchmark for the next time, equipped with the information of whatever response you may or may have not received.
When it comes to comparison, the moment you share that power with someone is the same exact moment you push them off a cliff into the abyss of eternal incertitude.
None of this is bad.
Being uncertain is not always a bad thing. Nor is being certain good. What separates paralysing (sometimes fatal) uncertainty from the humbling sort is the decision made after its emergence.
If a decision is taken to stay inside the comfort zone, that is an uncertainty that stagnates and becomes an unerasable scar. On the other hand, an uncertainty which is affirmed, appropriated, and given new life is followed by the decisive expansion of the comfort zone, most of the time in a permanent manner.
Saying “Yes” in the face of uncertainty is groundbreaking.
Saying “Yes” makes you active. Likewise with saying “No”. When you say “No” to remain determined in your perspective and protect your values, you are being selfish.
Being selfish means giving back the way you want to give back: knowledgeably.
Generously.
Powerfully.
