One of my colleagues has a tagline on her email. It’s:

Life begins where your comfort zone ends

It’s so true!

Out of the comfort zone is a, well… not very comfortable place to be. Sometimes we would go to the ends of the earth to avoid being stuck out of it. Just as much as we do whatever it takes to stay safely within it.

My mother would have lived her whole life snugly inside her comfort zone if she had been allowed to. Enter my father. He moved her away from her country of origin at the fragile age of 48 – just before the onset of menopause – with not one blood relative or friend closer than twenty hours by air. And she didn’t know how to speak English. Wow. If that doesn’t take you out of your comfort zone, I don’t know what will.

I don’t know if she would ever have been grateful for that experience, even forty years later, ’cause it was hard. Jeez, was it hard. I remember every day coming home from high school (only 11 years old), and my mother being in tears. She’d gone from a beautiful European city where she had networks and where her roots reached so deep and so wide that her life there was as natural as breathing to a place that was completely foreign, stuck inside a small flat in a strange suburbia, with not much to do and endless time in which to grieve all that she’d lost. And instead of me and my father understanding her bewilderment, we would come home and be grumpy with her because it wasn’t nice coming home to tears when we’d been out and about all day building a life.

And then, something happened.

Instead of continuing on her downward spiral, my mother decided to step back into a comfort zone (of sorts). She decided she would do what she knew made her feel good back home. She decided to reach for something familiar. And in doing so, she took back control of her life.

We’d been in Melbourne four months by then. It was June, the start of the southern hemisphere winter. And so she put on her mink coat, and her mink hat, and every day, she caught the tram not far from our little flat, right into the heart of the city, and she walked around, window shopping, and passing the time in a place where her world felt a little bigger than the one bedroom apartment to which she’d been confined for the last four months.

If you remember Melbourne in the 70s, you’re probably thinking how incongruous a stylish, mink-clad woman would have looked among the teenagers in skinhead gear, the dolly cuts, flares and platforms of the young and cool, and the twin-sets and pearls of the middle-aged women who were still, in those days, emulating the Queen.

That was the point at which my daily return from school was not met with tears.

And then my mother found out about language classes at Myer House, right on Elizabeth Street in the heart of the city. She attended these for a few years, made friends, and started to feel like she might have a life of her own here.

But still… Jeez, was it hard!

If we have a choice, if we can, we run right away and out of the comfort zone at breakneck speed, right back to a place that is friendlier and more familiar.

Sometimes – like in my mother’s case – that is clearly not possible. We get thrust out of the comfort zone, and it’s just a case of tough luck, mate. You’re stuck. You either survive or perish, and sometimes the choice doesn’t feel entirely your own.

A few years ago, I found myself seriously out of my comfort zone. I stayed there by choice. One step at a time, I kept moving forward. Slowly, sometimes, and with a few steps back. But mostly forward.

And here I am. I am still putting one foot in front of the other hoping for the best.

I am so glad I did not run away.