This is the third post in a WP challenge (“Bloganuary”) to write something every day throughout January with the aid of a prompt. The above title is the prompt.
We tend to think of a comfort zone as some kind of homogeneous place where we feel at ease. I think that it is helpful to think of a range of comfort zones that we inhabit, embracing areas such as physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and even moralistic. There are also several ways in which we can leave these zones – one step at a time, or maybe just putting one foot outside, or tripping over the line, or jumping, or maybe even being pushed. Nothing is simple in these matters.
I can guarantee being outside my comfort zone whenever I have to do something involving practical knowledge and skills. These are areas in which I freely admit to a level of incompetence. I even wrote a little poem about it for another project. This knowledge leads to marked avoidance of such tasks. The avoidance leads to lack of experience and the opportunity to re-evaluate my self judgement on those rare occasions that something actually goes right. It is a vicious cycle.
The following episode may not be the last time I left my comfort zone, but it is probably the last time I was actually pushed or kicked out of it. The shower malfunctioned and it was not possible to turn it off, except at the mains. This caused all sorts of inconveniences (including in “the private convenience”) and I could not find anyone to fix it. Some quick online searching helped me to identify the replacement unit I needed, and thankfully this arrived in the next couple of days.
I am naturally wary of doing anything involving water or electricity. I had to psyche myself up to do the task. It involved replacing the shower cartridge, which involved some (for me) major dismantling. This is one of the main challenges of DIY – before you can do what you need to do, you have to do something else. After much struggling to remove the final screw of the existing fitting, I had to call upon my builder neighbour for assistance. It was probably the first time we were in a shower together – for goodness sake, of course it was the first time! These were the days before Covid. It turned out I did not have the right sized screwdriver – probably not for the first time in my life, nor probably the last.
This little bit of DIY was one of those rare occasions when it was a success – perhaps that is why it is still vivid in my mind. When things go wrong and I start to put myself down, I recall the incident in the shower [not the (un)screwing bit, not the builder bit – the other bit when I successfully reassembled everything!].
To paraphrase Samuel Pepys, “…and so back to my comfort zone”.
The Frothy Filosofer 