Life does that to us, doesn't it? Just when we get settled into our comfort zone and have defined and accustomed ourselves to its boundaries--BANG! Something happens and the ground shifts. Our comfort zone is gone. We find ourselves rummaging around, trying to find it once again. Sometimes, the shift is a minor tremor and we regain our footing and rebuild it with some effort. But more often than not, the shift is colossal, like an internal earthquake, and no matter how furtively we look, nothing is familiar in the aftermath.
As we pick through the debris, desperate to reconstruct the familiar, we are left with some emotional options especially when it dawns us that the familiar is gone forever. We can give up, accept defeat and just sit down in the demolished pile of the used-to-be, feel sorry for ourselves and bemoan the tragedy of losing what we have become accustomed to, and then slowly wither and die. Or we can be completely self consumed and develop the belief that this only happens to us and very few can understand what we are going through, thus underscoring our general belief that life is a them vs. us scenario and, dammit, we are not going to let them win. Of course, the result of that is usually stress-induced health problems, an overall bitter attitude and a constant belief that life is hard and it sucks.
Or we can accept that maybe the whole point behind life is to have our comfort zones challenged and demolished on a fairly routine basis, and it's what we do to redefine, recreate, rebuild and thus morph into more flexible, pliant versions of ourselves that matters.
And you know what? The end result is that by doing the latter, we find that given enough time and enough experiences, our comfort zone expands and breathes and, sooner or later, it encompasses everyone, everything and every variation of life around us. The whole world, no, the universe, becomes our comfort zone.
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