I apologise for the brief hiatus in my blogging.
The current course has experienced some difficulties, as an unexpected tragedy struck the head of the course, and several stand-ins and schedule changes had to be organised. This is chaotic for all involved, and we students are probably the least affected.
Still, it has been difficult for me to wrap my head around things, so blogging has been difficult. It is not made easier by having three jobs and nine hours of dance lessons on top of university studies.
As I still don’t feel quite like I’ve come to grips with the course yet, I’ll let this particular post run in a different direction.
As you see, I am ridiculously busy right now, and it is the toughest I’ve faced yet. It is also the absolutely most rewarding and I feel more alive than ever.
And I believe it all comes down to living on the edge.
Now, I don’t mean ‘living on the edge’ as per the popular understanding: do extreme stuff where you’re close to dying to get a hormone rush. I find this to be rather immature, and believe that a mature person recognises that we could die any moment, and therefore don’t need to set up these extreme situations to challenge it.
By ‘living on the egde’, I mean living at the edge of my comfort zone.
Living at the edge of your comfort zone means, to me, that you learn to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You go beyond the need to feel good all the time and move toward personal growth and deepening relationships with other people.
Of course, sometimes it is too difficult, and I have to pull back into my comfort zone for a moment, just to cope. That happened this week. The key is to not stay there, but to get right back up and face the discomfort as soon as you’re centered again. It is almost as if being uncomfortable with being comfortable.
Relating this back to my earlier comment about the popular understanding of ‘living on the egde’, I feel that by living at our edge, by not settling for withering our time away, by being fully engaged, facing our fears and always growing, we are in a way challenging death, but in a way that serves our development and thus our ability to do good in this world.
I understand that this is not for everybody. I’m something of a nutter, and this is a way of life that appeals strongly to me. Of course, I am hinting that this is a good way to live, and would encourage all to consider our own relationship to the comfort zone, and whether we really want to live lives that are comfortable or full. How do you imagine in 30 years you’ll be glad to have lived?
