Like it or not, we all have a comfort zone. Some people’s are larger by nature. It takes a lot to really push them beyond their boundaries because their boundaries are far off, to begin with. But some of us have smaller comfort zones, and that’s alright too- as long as we are aware of it.
“If travelling was free you’d never see me again.” Every time I see this post I feel like asking are you sure about that? Because it seems to me that what you are going is attaching an impossible condition to something tangible.
You could travel for life- there are endless accounts of people doing just that. But it’s not for free. You have to find the means to do it. And beyond that, you have to want it. Not “posting a picture on Facebook” want it, “dreaming about it constantly and doing everything you can to make it happen” want it. Which leads me to the question, do you really want to travel for life?
Perhaps you think you do. Perhaps you are imagining your comfort zone much larger than it actually is. Maybe the reason you impose impossible conditions on your so-called dreams: “If I were younger, I’d quit my job and start over” “If I weren’t afraid of heights, I would go skydiving”, is because these aren’t things you actually want. You imagine them as things lying within your comfort zone that cannot be realised because of phantom obstacles. But what if the truth is that your comfort zone is just smaller than you think it is? What if these so-called unrealisable dreams are just things that lie beyond it?
If we spent our lives thinking that we would skydive if we weren’t afraid of heights, then we would never actually try. It’s time we stopped fooling ourselves. It’s time we realised that we could skydive if we dared to see these obstacles for what they are: phantom conditions we impose on things beyond our comfort zone because we don’t want to admit how small it really is.
To tell you the truth, if travelling was free, you’d probably still see me around, just less often. Because I don’t really want to travel for life. That’s waaay beyond my comfort zone and I acknowledge that. But I do want to take one month off to travel at some point. The idea makes me nervous but also excited. Why? Because it lies outside my not-so-big comfort zone. And that’s a good thing. I’d rather have a small comfort zone and do things that scare me every now and then, rather than fool myself into thinking I have a big comfort zone and never venture beyond the edge.
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