Leaving the comfort zone

Until the day I left Munich I thought that this journey was about leaving my physical comfort zone, my home. After not even a week I understood that it was more, that love was a topic to be heard and felt, as well. It was just today that I realized, that there was even more to come, and I got to the very core of it (as I think for now). This all is about leaving my own inner comfort zone called “me” or “I am”. This trip is another step in the long process of becoming me.

Leaving home

I didn’t choose the timing, time chose me.

I think there was not one comment I heard more often than that summer was over, and this wouldn’t turn out to be beach-holiday or summer vacation. Yes, that is true, but I never planned to go on a 6-months beach holiday-tour. I, in fact, didn’t really plan anything. The time was right, the decision to leave town just came to me, and didn’t leave any doubt. From there on everything just worked out well. I rented out my apartment and everything needed fell into place, so I could leave without any worries. Now, having started the journey, there is that energy, that shows me where to be when. I just need to listen, trust and follow.

Home, the physical place I call home, is a comfort zone, no doubt, no matter if in a positive, nourishing way or in a way of feeling attached and bound to it. I think a common misunderstanding about “comfort zone” is, that it always feels good to be in it, and that it always keeps you warm and safe. We rely on that somehow, but when you experience falling out of your comfort zone despite being, where you always have been, and where you did feel safe and warm before, you got good reason to think about the definition of comfort zone and you will probably ask yourself what home means to you. We try to avoid the feeling of loosing comfort. That might be a reason why so many people are not thrilled by the idea of sleeping in a car, tent or even outside later in the year than mid-August. The imagination and feeling of lying in a hammock at the beach and enjoying heat and sunlight until late is surely more comfortable than the cool breeze coming up at around 15:30 and sunset at 17:00 in winter-time. Yes, summer holidays are the most welcome comfort zone we can think of, and we do our very best to make them the most pleasant experience of the year. And if they are not we don’t like to talk about it too much.

We surely deserve to have this pleasant, relaxing and comforting experience we are craving for all year. These are the weeks that are given to us, (usually from our employers, school and paycheck), to digest our every-day life, to find distance to and get your minds and bodies off that consuming energy, which comes not only along with our work life. In my memories many of my holidays followed a pattern, just as “normal life” did. If I had a 2-week-break I was in a rush to do and see everything I wanted to. To relax, at least in the evenings, I drank more than usual. If I had 3 weeks off I felt the moment of detaching and finally gaining distance to every-day life after the first 2 weeks. The third week was a pleasant, diving-into wherever I was, and a much too soon end to it. But, that’s life, right?

When I was a kid and on holidays with my family, we used to travel up to 6 weeks in summer. This was the time I came in touch with the topic of comfort zone, although I couldn’t name it back then. When the destination of our travels was in Asia or Africa the holidays started off and ended coping with a culture-shock and jet-lag. The first week or so everything felt surreal, and I felt fighting or adapting to a new reality. The following weeks were packed with sights, smells, experiences and impressions that needed their time to be processed, still after returning home and going back to school (which was a daily challenge as well). Pretty obvious, that neither travelling nor returning home necessarily felt like comfort zone. What remained: the experience, that leaving the comfort zone is a challenge and that not even home is a guarantee for feeling comfy and relaxed. The experience of mental and emotional challenges, brought to me or triggered from the outside world, from dirty, noisy and crowded bus stations in India, just to give an example, did awaken senses and strategies to cope with it, that would have remained sleeping without these travels.

On the other hand, being and staying in the comfort zone does not equal being comfy and staying at ease. It can be limiting, confining and paralyzing. It can even be painful and damaging, often without that we realize it. Thoughts and ideas keep hitting the same roof, feelings keep being reflected and responded to in the same way, habits don’t change, even if they are self-destructive. Staying in the comfort zone to me felt limiting, like breaks were put on me, to keep me where I was. The purpose of keeping me where I was, was to avoid change and growth, the perfect combination to keep us going on and on and on in our routines of work-life plus x.

Can one be happy like this? I remember, as long as being and staying there is an unconscious habit, it works to just add some distracting moments and be happy about it. But once the big gates opened up and you are able to see what lies behinf unconsciousnes you won’t be able to close your eyes to it anymore. You start to feel the creeping dying of remaining on the spot, when what you want is to feel alive. I just know I got kicked out of the comfort zone of not knowing, seeing or feeling. That’s why I can’t just keep on going, that’s why I feel the need to break with habits. I am thankful, to have felt and still feel the resistance and revolt inside of me, after several years of giving into routine again. This energy is what makes me step out of my home, leave my routines, give up habits and leaving my beloved and oh so comfortable couch at home. I left my flat, the place I call home and where I was at home in exchange for my car, knowing that this was going to be a challenge. A journey with ups and downs, at times feeling alone, doubting, not knowing, questioning myself, alienated and feeling like an alien. I know this is the experience I need and I will get to where I’m supposed to get.

Love as comfort zone

The first emotional experience after having left didn’t make me wait for long. It was actually already part of this trip long before I left home. Love as a comfort zone. I was in that zone for the longest time of my life and it mostly wasn’t comfortable at all. I can only think of a few exceptions, experiences of love and relationship that were not necessarily uncomfortable, but limiting in other ways. The experience of love and relationship surely is the deepest and most defining experience for most of us, maybe all of us. We are deeply impressed and imprinted by feelings we consider to be love. I had to step out of a false definition of love, of patterns that were no love to me, believes of love I had lived. What made this love my comfort zone, was the fact, that I knew the dynamics and knew how to respond to them. I knew how the pain would feel like and I knew the strategies I could use, to make me go through heart-break and pain and in the end emerge from the depth again. This, as well, is comfort zone. The returning feelings of pain and suffering and knowing how to cope with them, turning in circles and keep suffering from what everyone else experiences, too. If everyone is in there, on that same path, it is normal, that I’m in there, too, right? No need to change, no need to do it differently, no way of stepping out, towards an unknown path. I had enough of it, the last heartbreak was devastating and I knew I wouldn’t survive another experience like this. It was time to leave that circle and the very first stop on my way brought me to that point or close to it. But I need to start this a few months earlier, in August 2020.

This summer I had, for the first time in my life, experienced, felt and tasted unconditional, pure love. A few weeks later I felt my ideas, wishes and visions of love, that had remained in their place, die. The experience of unconditional love made them useless, so they could leave, they were free to leave my system. What I consciously experienced happening was, that my image of love broke into pieces and disappeared. Right infront of my eyes, on a sunny day out in the woods. The whole image somehow broke open like an egg, dispensing the two parts of it. Loving and being loved. My images, that told me what love was, how it looked like, were closely connected to my ideas and wishes of loving, my way of sharing love with someone. By letting the image of love go, I had to detach also from my idea of how to love. There was no more “how to”, because there “was no more” love. My ideas of loving could not remain without the concept of love, just as egg white can’t keep any shape without the eggshell. That was a first and not too easy goodbye to something I had believed in, most of my life. So there I was, I had lost love, remained withou images, without believe, without wishes, without a clue on how to love. I got to understand, that what I had defined as being love, was just a part of it, a fraction. Since then I also feel, that love itself can only exist when there is loving and being loved in balance, being loved by yourself and sharing this love. The only way to love is sharing ones own love, the love for and within yourself. This is the core we need to reach, the hidden door deep inside we need to find and open it up for ourselfes, just then loving is possible. Just then we can share waht we found. Everything else is an illusion.

In October, just a few days and a few 100 km after leaving home, I was with friends in Graz I have a deep and open connection with. When I am in company of people I feel a special connection with, or an energy, that seems to be capable of carrying a deeper process of letting go, I get to the core of things. And so my process of letting love (as I knew it) go, continued. One morning I got in touch with the other part of love, the image of being loved. Although the shell, the big picture and frame, just as the egg white, my former image of loving were gone, the egg yolk was still untouched. It had kept its form, just as my ideas and wishes of being loved had remained the same. Now it was time to dissolve also these images and feelings. Every process of letting go is painful for me. Tears do help to release and wash it all away. The question on how I would and could be loved was answered by my thoughts. They made me asume wishes and expectations of my counterpart or partner, and brought up the question if I want to live up to them to be loved and lovable. First of all I felt that I didn’t want to live up to any expectations of anyone. This is simply not the purpose of life, so I decided that I wouldn’t. I did realize, as well, that it was my mind asuming that there were expectations. I guess this is a heritage of having experienced “love for fulfilling expectations” way too often. It is one of the oldest and deepest patterns imprinted in me, so it kept repeating itself. That morning in October I let go of my ideas and wishes to be loved. I had to step out of that whole circle, of the false comfort zone of knowing and being able to cope with it. This was not the way how being loved should continue to be like in my life. Just as every letting-go process it was a step out of the comfort zone towards freedom, with the possibility for something new to come.