Welcome to the Comfort Zone
A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. - John A. Shedd, The Yale Book of Quotations
By the end of this piece, you’ll probably have gone through the following thoughts:
“Wow he’s an idiot”
“Aww okay I guess he’s less dumb”
“Well at least he acknowledges he’s a hypocrite”
Let’s begin, shall we? Long post, so strap in!
(PS. I’m experimenting with using gifs to make this less boring, let me know what you think!)
I used to think that people who went traveling on gap years or to go ‘find themselves’ were delusional.
Why would you need to escape where you are now to go and ‘find out’ who you actually are? Spend all this money on a trip to go and frivolously spend it on experiences that don’t last…you aren’t building your future and once you return you slip back into the routines of your life anyway. What’s the point? That just shows a lack of time spent thinking about your own life and introspection of your behaviours, thoughts and feelings. Everyone’s just so stupid!
(Now, because I’ve definitely got you off-side, I’d just like to state for the record that I know that these types of thoughts were highly erroneous and probably things ingrained from childhood, but we’ll get there soon!)
I was a nerd that didn’t want to be a nerd through school - I was very bookish but didn’t really want that to be known, I freaking loved libraries (and I still do) but I would make sure I wasn’t always caught in them… as an example, one of my high school rituals was to get to school early, crack open my flask of tea, pick up my newspaper from the library, find a secluded corner near my lockers, and then read it ‘til school started.
Yeahh, that’s right, I was a super popular kid in school.
Maybe I was just a person who lived in their head a lot, or maybe I was trying to rationalise the fact that I was on The PathTM and I obviously had to be right because, y’know, I had thought about it enough. I read books, articles, I watched documentaries on intelligence because I think it’ll make me smarter (protip: it does)…I read a bunch of self-help books to try and be better…
But it absolutely pales in comparison to what you learn through experience (and more importantly, adversity). Recently I’ve had my share of adversity, and I got to learn more about my limits and how I’d react to things. These things have brought me to more realisations and learnings about myself that, well, I’m sure was one way that travel helped people when they first left school / uni.
I mean, I love meeting people but whatevs, this gif is great
You poke the boundaries of your comfort zone little by little, so that the bubble expands, and you find out what the big spiky things are out there that you don’t feel comfortable about, and you find the greenfields and meadows in the world that are full of opportunity, hope and…cows?
Okay, this metaphor got away from me…
Moral of the story: instead of being super judgemental about people going to ‘finding oneself’, I think the better expression is that people went to go and ‘push their boundaries’…or ‘find their cows’. I don’t know which is the better expression yet but I’m workshopping it.
I know not everyone does this for that reason, but it could be one of them!
Anyway, to round off the hypocrisy, I’ve now got a list of places and experiences I want to go and ‘find myself’ at.
Don’t @ me about my hypocrisy.
…but do @ me for recommendations of experiences and places to go - it’ll help me build out an itinerary of world-roaming and bucket-list-filling-in!
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.” - Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
Chat soon :)
✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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Truth Hurts - Lizzo - Look, I don’t often recommend music because I have very random taste, but I heard this on the radio and it’s super fun and dancy and I’ve been listening to it on repeat for like 3 weeks so yup.
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Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat - This might be the topic of another post, but what I used to find difficult about following recipes is that I never knew why things happened. What happens if I use a whole onion instead of half? What if I don’t have paprika right now? What if I have the wrong cut of meat?? Why do I need to bake it at this temperature for 30 mins?!? ARGH!! SFAH provides a really simple framework to think about dishes, no matter what cuisine, and it has been a phenomenal help in pushing me to cook more!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Fragrance AI - I never though that AI would ever achieve their Everest, but they have - helping to create fragrances!
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Who keeps the chalk market going?! - an interesting rundown on how a niche market of mathematicians is keeping chalk in business. Will Sharpies go the same way?
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This is Water - I haven’t read anything by David Foster Wallace, but this speech helps bring me out of the mundanity of life and appreciate the little things