The Best Things are Often Outside Your Comfort Zone

I’m a person who loves his comfort zone. One of my favorite vacations of the year is the one I take around Christmas, because I go nowhere. I stay at home and play games and watch movies and eat food. It’s lovely. But as anyone who’s been following my life lately can tell you, I do many more trips and vacations than that, and most of them end up requiring a whole lot of planning and travel. Each time one of those vacations comes up, I inevitably wonder what in the world I was thinking that made me think it was a good idea.

Because I like my comfort zone. I’d happy stay at home each day. It’s comfortable. It’s familiar. It’s easy.

But often the best things in life are none of those. The things I remember for years after are the things that brought me out of that zone. That forced me to do things I’ve never done before. My mission to Germany. My semester abroad in Israel. Family vacations to Dublin, Paris, London, Germany, and Slovakia. Situations where I was frantically scrambling around, trying to piece things together and then hoping for the best as we headed off to the airport.

Of course. one could say those experiences are the most memorable because they involved the most pain. They were hard, but as time goes by, I forget the hard parts of them and only remember the good parts. And that’s true, no doubt. But it’s also true that the times that I have struggled the most have also been the ones that have had the biggest impact on who I am as a person.

This is strange. I’m trying to just talk about “hard” vacations, and I somehow keep being drawn to make a connection between hard times and hard vacations. Clearly there’s a difference between the two. Going through turmoil in life is much different than bringing it upon yourself because you want to go to Europe for a few weeks. But I’m reminded of rollercoasters. They’re terrifying, really. You strap yourself into a machine that’s going to whirl and loop and race you all over the place. It’ll jostle and rumble and shake you. Why do we love them? It’s chaos, and far from comfortable.

But I think we like them because it’s a way of having those tough times without having to have too many of the baggage that goes along with them. It’s controlled terror. Constrained.

And maybe that’s why I love these vacations, as much as I dread them and panic as I wonder if I have everything under control before we leave. (How will I get from the airport to the hotel when we arrive? What will we do? Where will we eat? How do we get tickets?) The lead up to the vacation is the same as getting in line and waiting for the ride to begin, listening to the clack clack clack as the coaster approaches the top. And then the big day arrives, and it’s whirls and loops and races all the way to the finish.

Chicago starts tomorrow. Then comes Utah, Yellowstone, family reunions, and more. It’ll be a fun ride, and I don’t know how much I’ll be able to post to my blog for the next while. Apologies in advance.

Wish me luck.