Outside The Comfort Zone

A good friend who is roughly my age came to visit this morning, fresh from a family ski trip she had been dreading for months. Her husband and teenage sons had booked the holiday for themselves, and at the last minute she surprised herself by insisting on going along with them.

"But you're not into sports!" her sons said. She smiled. "And you can't ski!" her husband reminded her, though he didn't really need to. They'd been skiing before, years earlier, and it had been a disaster.

"If I don't learn now, I never will," she countered.

To make a long story short, she had a blast -- and she can now ski. The best part of the trip was when her three men skied up alongside her and did a double take when they realized who she was. She had exceeded their wildest expectations, but better yet, she had exceeded her own.

"It was so beautiful," she said. "It would have been worth it for that alone. "

A few years back my cousin Bonnie turned fifty. Her son, a university student, told her he had gotten her a surprise birthday present -- something really special.

"Will I like it?" she asked anxiously. There was something about his manner that made her uneasy.

He smiled. "I'm not sure. But you know how you keep saying you're in a rut? That you don't try anything new?"

"Yes..."

"Well, this will help you get out of that rut."

Quite understandably, she was filled with foreboding, especially when, on her birthday, she was driven fifty miles out into the desert.

"Mom, lighten up and you'll enjoy it," her son reassured her. "I've already done it, and it's fantastic."

Like most teenage boys, her son is a bungee-jumping daredevil, so this did not make Bonnie feel much better, especially five minutes later when she saw the large sky diving sign. My cousin has terrible acrophobia.

To make a long story short, she went through with it. Got into the airplane, allowed herself to be fitted with a parachute, listened attentively as the instructor ran through the drill. She had to be pushed to the door of the plane, then pushed off, but she let them do it, and no one got injured in the process.

"I was fine once I resigned myself to dying," she confessed. "I told my son that I loved him, and that I forgave him. Then, I really did forgive him when he just laughed at me. I knew that I was jumping to my death. Once I'd gotten past that, I was fine."

I've seen the film of her doing this, and it filled me with respect. You can see her digging her heels into the floor of the plane, almost prying off the hands of those 'helping' her exit the plane. And you can see her face during the jump -- her expression of awe as she hurdles through layers of blue, floating through depths of sky to the glittering desert sands beneath her.

"It was fantastic," she said. "I can't even begin to describe it."

Her son was phenomenally proud of her, of course, but that was as nothing compared to her own sense of pride and accomplishment.

I can't ski, and I've never gone ski-diving, but I too have operated outside my comfort zone: I was a squirrel, or more accurately, an ecureuil. We were visiting friends in France, and with five kids to entertain, chose an adventure playground that had sounded pretty tame: an outside play area with tarzan ropes and steel cables strung from tree to tree that people could swing on. We'd visited similar places in Japan when the kids were tiny, and pictured something even toddlers could handle. Maybe even something I could handle.

Now I'm fine with heights and I love flying, but I'm not fine with the idea of falling and the subsequent trauma involved. It might sound odd, but I don't mind walking across rope bridges and looking down into the gaping gorge below; I just hate the idea of hitting the rocks. I am also woefully uncoordinated, though reasonably fit and strong, and lack a sense of balance. So when I decided to try the squirrel experience, I amazed myself. I let the young French guide fasten me into my safety harness and felt an almost surreal sense of horror: it was bad enough that my kids and husband were going to be doing this, but was I really joining them?

Yes, I was, though as I stood in line, waiting to climb my first tree, I almost felt as though I was already out of my own body.

The trees were almost all three-storey numbers, and the heights were such that if you fell, you knew you wouldn't suffer much: the impact would ensure a swift, though messy, death. All that stood between oneself and The Great Mystery was a worryingly small steel clip, securely fastened to the harness by one end, and to the cable by the other. I know that it was securely fastened because I tested and retested my own -- and my kids' -- by tugging on them as hard as I could. Intellectually I knew that the steel clip was strong enough to hold my weight, but as I soared Tarzan-style from tree to tree, I just knew it was going to snap, causing me to plummet to my untimely and tragic death. But my sturdy little steel clip did not let me down. When we finally left the park, I felt like shaking its hand or embracing it, so deep was my respect and gratitude.

That steel clip supported me as I climbed steeple-high trees, as I teetered along rope ladders that soared over the treetops and merrily bubbling rivers below. It reassured me as I hurled myself at rope nets and struggled to negotiate them, enduring the running commentary of interested young Frenchmen (hope they couldn't understand my English!) and chewed my lip to a pulp as I watched my children soaring along their own cables, at impossible heights.

And when it was all over and my family all rushed to congratulate me, clearly amazed at my bravery, their praise was as nothing next to my own sense of accomplishment.

There is something about getting older that makes us all too prone to be sedentary, to stop trying new things and new sensations. Partly from a horror of becoming too tame and set in our ways, there is also something about the ageing process that makes us want to challenge this awful inertia. The trick is to push ourselves just enough -- to live outside our comfort zone, so to speak and not allow discretion to take over valor entirely. Once in a while, it is good to attempt something so completely out of our range that the thought of it almost takes our breath away.

Speaking of which, my friend who has learned to ski told me that one of her New Year's resolutions is to stop whining. Personally, I'm leaving that one for next year.


I too was up this high! Picture found at the following site: http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d181/ipiroro2/accrobranche/?action=view&current=DSCN2500.jpg