I've been increasingly interested in others' motivation to leave that comfort zone and try something new and unknown. Or, alternatively, I'm curious about how routines begin in the first place and then how they stick. Nothing starts out as a routine. It builds to that, but at some point, the newness of it wears off and the comfort zone expands.
I have often been of the opinion that I hate anything new. New people, new ideas, doing new things, all of it makes me uncomfortable. And while I openly admit that I hate anything new, that is not necessarily the case. Hate may be too much. It's more of a lack of comfort. Sort of like someone stabbing me with a knife in an area that is not life threatening. I don't like it, it is not comfortable, but then once the knife is removed, I will heal and have a small scar from it. Then I will call the police since I just got stabbed. What is this world coming to, anyway? You can't just stab someone and it's okay. It's not. It's not okay.
But anyway, I really don't have a problem meeting new people. I have a problem with unimportant surface conversations. I guess when you first meet someone, you don't know them enough to have deeper conversations. To me, that first bit is uncomfortable. That digging in and trying to get to know someone is cumbersome and flawed. I take a true comfort in routine.
I like knowing the scope of most likely possibilities, and I like knowing that my knee-jerk reaction to an on-the-fly situation will have already been tried and true. There is no fumbling around for some insight on the correct way to proceed. I've been through a situation very similar before and already know how to handle it. Purposefully putting yourself in uncomfortable situations is a foreign concept to me. I don't get why anyone would purposefully do that.
Obviously I'm an inward thinker. Perhaps those social butterflies are not inward thinkers, or maybe their confidence level is way higher than mine. I certainly can't pretend to know the answer. So, as per my usual philosophical, inward thinking brain slowly ticks...I try to imagine any and all reasons that someone would not hold the same beliefs about comfort zone expansion as I.
Maybe people that purposefully seek a change in routine(I call it comfort) is because they are adrenaline junkies. They must like that rush of uncertainty. They must revel in that crazy chaos of change! Okay. So that's one reason. Maybe another reason is despite the fact that it's not comfortable, they force themselves to do it because they know, consciously or subconsciously, that after the initial discomfort, they will now have a broadened idea of comfort.
I like the simple routine of things and I very much dislike monotony. These things work in counterpoint to one another. I guess when the scale of monotony gets heavier than the scale of routine and comfort, I stick a big toe just outside my routine; never too far, though, because I may need to pull in back in quickly. So it really is, for me, that nefarious quote of my former mentor; "Change occurs when the pain of staying the same is more than the pain caused by making a change."
The pain of monontony, for me and as of late, has increased to a level that requires me to make a change. My routine has been broadening, little by little. It will continue to broaden, too, until a time when I look back on my former routine and find that I am so far off the reservation, the view is scary, and looks to be too far outside of my comfort zone to ever make that journey back. A broadened comfort zone is biased, then, based on how good our memory serves us, and mine's not so great.
Check out my satirical fiction:
"Delightfully offensive!" Slighted by humanity, God must put down the bottle long enough to save the world...
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