Finding a New Comfort Zone
The SOLD sign is gone. The money is in the bank. The new owners have moved in.
I’ve loved my century old brick home perched on hill. The open floor plan. Rooms flooded with light throughout the day. Deep windows that didn’t need to be draped. The sometimes joyful, sometimes raucous laughter of neighborhood children. The shaded north-facing garden with its spontaneously-generated masses of tiny grey-green moss flowers alongside my intentional beds of color by the season—daffodils, astilbe, roses, lilies, and phlox.
I lived there thirteen years, much longer than any place else. It’s where I wrote Sailing Down the Moonbeam and completed several drafts of my forthcoming novel A Fitting Place. Twice now, coming from town, I have driven right past my new home, heading to the old one out of habit.
And yet, in a way I don’t fully understand, I am glad that house is behind me.
Some of the reasons are obvious. One is a growing resistance to the burdens of a charming but also aging house with a garden that needs constant tending. Another is my desire to travel; I want a place I don’t have to worry about when I’m away. And it seems right and fitting that Kent and I should have “our” home instead of trying to carve out a place for him in “my” home.
Less obvious is the notion of stepping outside your comfort zone, of having to deal with a world that is different and sometimes unsettling. Since childhood, I’ve consistently strayed beyond the boundaries of whatever situation—good or bad—I happened to be in, in search of new ideas and new experiences.
If you define comfort as places and things that are familiar, I’ve spent most of my life outside my comfort zone.
Perhaps “familiar” is not where my comfort zone lies. Perhaps my comfort zone lies in meeting the challenge of the different and unsettling. Could it be that my much loved house had become too familiar and it was simply time to move on?
How do you define your comfort zone? Do you need to redefine it from time to time?
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