Imagining What is Possible
I got a manicure today, primarily because I absolutely adore the people who work there. It’s a female-owned place near my house, and the mother and her two daughters own it. My regular gal, I’ll call her Olive, was telling me about a modelling gig that she’s trying out for in London next week. She said that she wasn’t sure she wanted to go. It was going to cost her about £100 to get down to London and back for the day. The designer (this audition thing is for London Fashion week) is really… innovative? I’m talking science fiction-level couture, folks. Olive is a beautiful, blonde, English girl who sees herself as ‘normal’ (note to self to write another post about ‘normal’). She said that she wasn’t really their type. Most of the models in photos from this designer’s fashion exhibitions were really thin and tall, with sharp, chiselled features.
We bantered about the clothing in the pictures (‘Is that an upside-down head of napa cabbage?’) for a moment, and then she looked at me and dropped it. “I think the reason I don’t want to go is that it makes me uncomfortable. It pushes me outside of my comfort zone. It’s a lot of money, yes, but I’ll spend that on a weekend out easily. Maybe I just need to do it.”
I smiled. How did a 19-year-old understand this already? I’m 47 years old and still need to remind myself to ‘breathe, Kristin… it’s only the imagined border of your comfort zone’ every so often. It’s something I talk to people about so often. Women giving birth. Women finding themselves again after immersing themselves in motherhood for a few years. How do we put ourselves out there? What benefit could we gain if we take a chance on something that is so unfamiliar, so radical, so out of the realm of what we believe is possible?
This is something I’ve been contemplating lately. Not only does pushing outside of your comfort zone help you build your creativity, build your self-confidence, develop your resilience, and learn more about yourself, it also means you’re questioning the parameters of possibility. What our human minds think is available to us is so much more limited than what we are capable of. And when we do that ‘one forbidden thing’ (thanks, Mr. Campbell) and move into that discomfort, it just might be that we realise we are capable of more than we could have ever imagined.