A comfort zone is a great kind of thing. It's... well... comfortable. It's familiar and lends itself to security. It gives us a safety net that really just kind of lets us cruise through a day without turning our brains on or worrying about too much.
The scary part about that is, we don't want to start cruising too comfortably. Sure, being able to predict everything that's going to happen to you is really nice, but when that really becomes the case we start to lose our sense of adventure. Most of the people reading this are high school kids, college age or just out college, and if there's one thing we really shouldn't be losing it's our curiosity. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm too busy losing my mind over trying to shove as much into every day as possible between school and greek life and other extracurriculars to want to lose anything else.
That being said, there isn't much time left in the day after all of those things are said and done. And that's where the comfort zone actually becomes an issue. When we're going all day long, pretty much every day of the week, we end up just living inside of this insulated bubble, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it really cuts down on your drive to go explore new things.
With that we stop growing. The idea behind life as a whole, as far as I can tell, is to experience. Just to experience as much as humanly possible in the time that we're given here. So really, the ruts that life throws us into need to be broken out of. If there's one thing we really need to stop being, it's boring.
I try my best to break out of my comfort zone as much as possible. For a really long time, the lock screen on my phone was just two words: Why not? That was enough to get me moving to go and push my boundaries as much as I could for as long as it too to become habit, and now I'm trying to get as many people as I can to actually put the "Adventure" in the Adventure of Life.
So I'm issuing a challenge. That's a challenge to go out and try something, anything that is unfamiliar or scary. It doesn't have to be anything big. Actually, it can be downright minuscule. Start by getting a different kind of ice cream from the Caf or when someone asks you if you want to take off to Walmart at 1:00 a.m., go with them.
Don't let yourself stay in the rut that life can be. Get the ball rolling somehow, and like Matt Damon says in "We Bought a Zoo," "All you need is twenty seconds of insane courage, just literally twenty seconds of embarrassing bravery, and I promise you something great will come of it." Our experiences define and shape us, so why wouldn't you want to push to be the best that you can be?
