comfort zone

Here is a lens to look through for a moment: life is a game of tug-of-war between stability and change.

On one side of the rope, there is your comfort zone, where things are familiar and predictable. It’s the realm where you have good friends and family whom you understand and who understand you. It’s where all your things are. It’s your daily schedule. It’s the food and the culture and the language you grew up with. It’s activities that you’ve done a million times before. It’s warm and cozy--a place to come home to. It’s where you can feel safe enough to let down your defenses and fall asleep at night.

Pulling on the other side is change--everything new and unfamiliar. It can be anything unexpected or anything you have no experience dealing with. A place you haven’t been to before. A way of thinking that’s foreign from your own. People you don’t know. New issues between old friends. Having to do something you have never done before. The loss of something you had come to take for granted. A new situation. This is the source of all stress and at the same time the stuff of life.

We tend to think of stress and change as a bad thing. Much of the time, at least on a short-term scale while it’s happening, it does feel bad. It’s not pleasant to be unsure, which is what facing change necessarily entails. You’re not sure if you’ll handle it right or if you’ll make a fool of yourself and screw things up. Or maybe it feels completely out of your control and you just brace yourself and wonder what kind of damage you will suffer by it. You want to just run back and hide in your comfort zone because it’s so safe there. But in the long-term, we learn and grow from the change. This is how we gain experience: by having experiences we haven’t had yet. This is how we develop skills: by facing tasks we haven’t mastered. This is how we learn: by contemplating things that are strange and different.

I guess there are different degrees of stress, because a certain level of it is usually welcomed. As living, breathing humans, we have an inate desire to seek out challenges. Why else do we move away from home and go to college? We want to explore and grow. Many times we literally invite the uncertainty into our lives, because it’s simply more exciting and interesting that way. People have varying preferences for how much they want to stress themselves out. Some are addicted to it... And though you do have some amount of control over how much change there is in your life, there will always be times when change and stress will sneak up on you whether you wanted it or not.

The mindset I want to impart here, to readers but also to myself, is that this is an integral part of life. Change rears its head and makes things all unstable temporarily, but it’s not like getting past it will solve everything, because there will routinely be some sort of newness or change popping up like that. You can’t escape it. You wouldn’t want to escape it. The second part of the mindset is that this change is ultimately good. Reason 1 why it’s good: you learn from it. Reason 2, and arguably the more satisfying reason: when you are jostled out of your comfort zone, you are suddenly handed the chance to look back and see in a whole new way how beautiful and sweet that comfort zone is to you. Suddenly everything is sizzling and alive. Taking things for granted is boring.

In that vein, I would like to offer up a heartfelt appreciation for everything and everyone that I realize has come to mean stability in my life. As a whole: the music school. To all my musician friends, colleagues, and especially roommates--I love you all! What a life we lead. Every moment of free time during the day is a moment that could/should be spent practicing. There’s always something to do. Always a glamorous and lofty goal in mind--a performance, an audition, a summer program touring around Europe. Always we strive to make our time more efficient, whether we always succeed at that or not. I love my harp. I love that after uncountable hours spent cradling it on my shoulder, practicing has passed out of that realm of a drudging sense of duty to a soothing sense of familiarity. It feels good. It’s something I’m in control of. I don’t mind being alone to practice--I thrive off of it. So, there’s that fiercesome sense of independence that we all have to have, and then the equally fierce sense of community. We toil away in our isolated practice rooms, then emerge to chat in the halls (more often than not, the person you pass on your way down the stairs is someone you at least recognize), and eventually come together for orchestra rehearsals to create music on a larger scale than any of us could hope to do alone. David, thanks for kick-starting the semester with a great conducting recital!

I also love my roommates for their kindness and thoughtfulness. I love their undying devotion to morals and their sensitivity. I love the work ethic that hangs thick in the air, always pushing to accomplish more and soak up more knowledge. I love their cooking and especially their baking. I love the sense of family in our apartment, which I think may be something relatively rare. I don’t want to take any of it for granted.