No Parking - Comfort Zone

If I had a dime for every time someone told me that I was in the wrong business, I’d have been able to retire much earlier than I did.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t good at what I did.  In fact, at the risk of boasting, I’ve been told that I was very good at it.  It’s just that I was never entirely comfortable in the world of finance and I think it showed.  Nonetheless, I was able to apply my talent and skills in a way that allowed me to get real satisfaction from my work while earning a nice living.  Still, there were times when I struggled and complained and then someone would tell me the answer was to “move out of my comfort zone.” I hated hearing that.  When someone said it to me, it almost made me want to punch them in the nose because I thought I was already outside of it and what I really wanted was to spend just a little bit time in it.

What I realize now is that the trick isn’t to get outside of your comfort zone. The trick is to expand your comfort zone to encompass the new and unfamiliar. And, in fact, that’s what I was doing, even if I didn’t realize it. As I moved into new, untried areas, I gained new perspectives and developed new skills that made me comfortable later when faced with similar but new circumstances. 

Expanding comfort zones didn’t just work on the job.  I loved embarking on new adventures without concern or anxiety thinking, “Let’s see what happens.”  It seemed easy to do that once.  It might be a natural function of age, but it feels much harder to do that now.  There’s a distinct inclination – and I’m fighting it -- to want to stay where I’m comfortable, at home near my family and friends and surrounded by “my stuff.”  I’m resisting it with all my might because I watched my parents’ comfort zone shrink around them until they were unwilling to do anything they hadn’t done before.  In recent years, they went to just three restaurants – Gargiulo’s, Joe’s of Avenue U and, improbably, Roll ‘N Roaster,” (where they’ll “put cheese on anything you please.”) and they wouldn’t try any others. When the NYC subway system switched from tokens to MetroCards my dad stopped going into the city, even though I went with him to the B train station at Brighton Beach to show him how to buy and use one.  He never took the subway again after that. My mom's comfort zone shrunk, first to her house and eventually to her living room where she spent the day and slept the night.

I take their experience as a cautionary lesson. I’m determined to keep pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone and do all I can to keep them from closing in on me.  Any advice or guidance would be welcomed.  In the meantime, Pal O’ Mine Mark Yost tells me they’ve added pizza to the menu at Roll ‘N Roaster.   That’s a change!  I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with it, but next time I’m back in Brooklyn, you wanna go for a slice?