When I was in kindergarten, the only thing I ever remember doing besides napping and recess was coloring. I remember one picture that we were given to color distinctly. It was a girl walking down the street, Now I can’t remember whether she was pushing a stroller or walking a dog, but I’m positive she’s eating a doughnut. The young boy sitting next to me had an interesting suggestion when he accidentally saw me color outside the lines.
“Just color the whole thing red…”
Huh, okay, I mean, what could it hurt, right? I colored the whole picture red. Also, to the delight of my little friend, I colored the second picture we received orange.
“What did you just do” my teacher screamed as she stood above me, glaring down at my work. I was in huge trouble. She yelled at me in front of the entire class. I sat there and bawled my little 5-year-old eyes out while everyone else was turning in their pictures. Weeks later, I remember being so ashamed when my parents came for some parents’ night at school. Our teacher displayed our work on the wall. I looked up and saw my all blazingly red-colored page. I remember well the feeling of mortification when seeing it in comparison to the others.
All because I had colored outside of the lines.
It’s probably no surprise that I have had a certain amount of trouble in my life being out of my “comfort zone.” It’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time. The lesson I learned that day in kindergarten was to go outside of what is “normal” will bring wrath from whoever for whatever. It’s so easy to stay stuck there. It’s warm and safe, and everything in life can be linear for as long as you want it to be.
Notice I didn’t say peaceful or happy. I said linear. You go from point A to point B in your life every day. Nothing special. No improvement. No achievement. Everything is very status quo. Everything is, well, boring.
When you move outside of your comfort zone, you become open to all of the possibilities for your life. What makes us want to stay in that safe place is the desire to avoid disappointments, demanding challenges, and loss. Our brains become satisfied to stay in the monotony because they don’t like change. It likes the guaranteed and already established performance of your life. New things automatically mean more energy needs to be exerted by an already maxed out system. It doesn’t understand that the stress on the energy supply to do new things is good stress. Having that good stress can help you adapt more readily to changes and give you an increased ability to deal with the twists and turns that life will take, comfort zone, or not. Life happens no matter how well you try to stay in your bubble.
Learning to get out of your comfort zone is easier than you think. Just do one small thing that you wouldn’t do. Change up your routine. Take a different way home from work or an event. If you start to feel daring after a while, visit and walk around a nearby town or talk to someone you usually wouldn’t, but start small. Get used to it. Start pushing those invisible boundaries of what’s familiar. When you focus on the possibilities for your life and use it to move beyond the standard, the sooner you’ll be more comfortable with the change and flexibility that stepping outside of your comfort zone provides, it won’t feel like death.
You have to ask yourself, though, as you stay in your cozy world, are you really living? It may be stable, but I’m betting it’s stagnant, too. If I had to say one thing to make you want to experience life outside of the cocoon you have skillfully constructed, it would be this: All of the bad things are much easier to take when you are doing something about which you are genuinely passionate. I get it; it’s hard to fight the notion that nothing wrong will happen if I stay right here inside the lines…
…nothing good will happen either. Go ahead. Color the whole picture red.
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