My father always says ‘there is a first time for everything’. My mother says ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’. While I have a tendency to follow in my mother’s footsteps, I think my dad probably has more fun. This weekend has been a series of firsts. Doing anything for the first time involves a certain amount of risk. The first time you walk, drive, ask someone out, they all involve making yourself vulnerable in a way previously unknown to you. You can and probably will fall, misjudge breaking distance, say the wrong thing, but none of these are really dangerous, well, it depends on how much you misjudge breaking distance. They can wound your pride, but you are in charge of how quickly that heals.

I’ve been making something of an effort to do things that I don’t usually do. (The look on my dad’s face when I told him that I had eaten sashimi was priceless.) The small changes can lead to bigger ones. I decided to go to SXSW which lead to responding to a distress tweet from Ori, which lead to getting drunk for the first time. In context, all of these activities were safe, but they were out of my comfort zone. Truthfully, however, my comfort zone had been getting smaller for a while. It feels good to be taking steps to stretch my confines and just try.

Even just doing things I don’t like, like valet parking and going through drive throughs can help me make more impactful choices later. So, tonight, I valet parked my car and ate venison cooked medium . Neither is anything I would have done three weeks ago, but valet was fine, and the venison was exceptional. I also made plans to go to San Diego later in the year. I bought the ticket, so now I know I will follow through. I promised my friend Jason that I would go open ocean kayaking with him while we are there. It’s not skydiving, but I don’t need it to be. I just need to take a look at what is in front of me and make a choice. Am I likely to get killed? Is it creepy? Any other really good reason to say no? Well, okay then, let’s go.

What’s next? We’ll see.

Tags: comfort zone, drunk, motivation, Outside of my Comfort Zone, risk, shy

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Comfort Zone Stretches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.