What's Your Comfort Zone?

And a Beach Read Alert!

The Nam…

You wake up at a certain time, day in and day out after having been to bed the night before at the same time, night in and night out. You eat the same thing for breakfast, use the bathroom at the expected time, maybe exercise, shower up, dress, head to work, come home, Netflix, bed. Rince, repeat ... Until the day you don’t wake up. Unless of course, you get hit by a bus. Metaphorically speaking. Oh, the drama.

The days, the weeks, the months, the years will have passed, and you suddenly realize (as you gaze into the bathroom mirror at the receding hairline and the gray hair) that you haven’t done a damn thing with your life. I have always believed in living life as an adventure because there’s just so much out there to do and to explore.

You don’t have to do what they tell you to do when you’re growing up or when you’re in school. You can break out of the prescribed box that’s what’s expected of you. You can become your own person. You can be an individual among the lemmings who eat, sleep, TV, bed, and do the country club thing on the weekends. That’s no way to go through life. Routine is death and death is routine.

And yet, no one’s more guilty of adhering to the daily scheduled comfort zone than I am. I need it as a writer who’s required to put out a certain word count every day. It’s all about the content, after all.

But there are times when the comfort zone turns into the uncomfort zone. Times when there’s no coffee, no hot water, no sleep, no decent food, no TV, no clean toilet (or any toilet for that matter) and for God’s sakes, no internet. You travel to a third world country or a country under siege by war and/or revolution. You do something stupid like eat some unclean leafy greens or brush your teeth with tap water or use ice cubes in your Coke and you end up you spending some quality, one on one time, with a fly infested toilet. Don’t forget to bring your own TP. But you can always get a Coke. No matter where you go in the world there’s Coke and Pepsi (and KFC). Talk about the comforts of home.

Some people need the seaside vacation. Some people go to Paris only to shop in the same stores they shop in back home. Nothing life changing in that. But who am I to knock it?

I originally wrote this piece, or one like it, in the uncomfort zone of Chernobyl on what was then the Ukraine/Russia border, pounding out the words awaiting for what I hoped was a decent cup of coffee. I had entirely zero expectations. But what I did get was a decent dose of radiation and now I have lymphoma. Surprise, surprise. But bey, you can live with it, or so the doctors tell me.

Once upon a time, my 4X4 was stopped by an AK47 armed soldier in the middle of The West African bush country (he demanded a bribe) Then there was the smell of black smoke in Egypt during the revolution and lying inside a sarcophagus way down inside the third Great Pyramid (I was the only occupant due to the U.S. sponsored color revolution).

I’ve slept in my clothes beside a pack of camels in the Sahara, nearly drowned to death in the Ganjes ten years ago in 110-dgree heat. Climbing to the Sun Gate at Machu Picchu was a real treat, and chasing down Rhino in the Chitwan Forest in Nepal can be exhilarating. Keeping a low profile in Moscow is a must, while getting sucker punched and nearly losing my two front teeth in Italy was just another Tuesday...These are just a few of the uncomfort zones and experiences that have made my life all the richer over the course of the past few years.

I love them. My writing does too. Just ask my pal, Chase Baker.

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