I'll be over here in my comfort zone, chillin' out
Further to that earlier discussion of comfort zones, I came slap up against this in what is probably an otherwise meritorious piece by The Default Person about a conference that was very heavily emphasising and practising diversity. And boy did it make him uncomfortable.
(NB I can't quite see why, because what is discomfort-making about the access etc things they had in place? Why is having a range of dietary options discomfiting? - George Orwell thou shouldst be living etc*.) “No one grows in a comfort zone.”.... Being uncomfortable enables me to identify areas where I need to improve because marginalizing others is not just something the “nebulous other people do.”
I want to quote him back that thing that Louisa May Alcott says in ?Good Wives? about some natures flourishing best against a sunny wall, and others needing the nip of frost, and I think that acknowledgement of diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks is much closer to the truth on the individual level.
Recall time in my life when I had been spending far too much of it way outside my comfort zone and it took a major depressive episode to make me think about where my comfort zone was and when I did and did not want to push it.
And to extend LMA's horticultural metaphor, nobody says a plant really does better if you transplant it from the kind of soil and shelter and degree of moisture it likes to some other plot.
But on the level of groups, most people probably live with a lot more challenges to their comfort zone than Mr Default Person. Yeah, it made him think. But if he had to live with constant encroachments on it, he might find his comfort zone was the place where regrouping, selfcare, and self-development took place.
*See The Road to Wigan Pier - existence of a veggie option be harshin' Eric's squee. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2242768.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.