Walking Towards the Comfort Zone

In popular culture, the ‘comfort zone’ is regarded as a state of complacency that people need to break out of in order to grow and acquire new skills. Alasdair White, a management theorist, in 2009 defined a comfort zone where a person reaches a steady level of performance in the absence of stress, leading to conducive steady output. White argues that businesses need to find their comfort zone in order to go beyond their limitations.

I related his theory to my personal needs, and the meaning of the word ‘comfort’ in my own experience ended up being very different to the meaning implied in the White’s term of ‘comfort zone’.

The definition of the word comfort generally means having things at ease, or requiring minimal effort to acquire the necessary. And if I have to name a place that matches the word, I cannot think of any other place than my hometown, Bombay. But a comfort zone, in White’s understanding, does not mean having things at ease, but it simply means doing things that you love without stress; and moving to Auroville made me realise that I hadn’t found my comfort zone yet.

Acquiring this steadiness in cities is quite paradoxical. Stress and traffic are part of the city routine, and the majority of people do not leave their workplaces before sunset, ever! And even though employees have some comforts while they work – like a hot chocolate on the desk every hour – the amount of productivity one is able to deliver is as fluctuating as the aim. As an aspiring writer, it is difficult to find a place that supports your writing style and doesn’t often give you a writer’s block. I happened to find a place in Auroville that didn’t just ask me what I can do; rather it asked me what I want to do. I did not have to adapt to a style, but rather, I have the freedom to write in a form I choose. My workplace in Auroville did not offer materialistic privileges like hot chocolate on the table, but it did offer the independence to write from a rooftop café if the office space was draining my creativity – an approach which actually yields more valuable results that are closer to what I want to achieve.

So even though I have lived all these months in Auroville without the comfort of city life, home-cooked food and lizard-free rooms, when people from Bombay ask me what I am exactly doing in Auroville and why I have left so much behind, my answer is always the same – I am walking towards the comfort zone.