The Magic of Leaving Your Comfort Zones in Retirement

He's done it around the world, but you can do it at home

By Jonathan Look for Next Avenue

Credit: Thinkstock

One of the biggest goals of my career as an air traffic controller was having a worry-free retirement. I envisioned a comfortable place where I could lie back and watch the world pass by; where I could live not only without work, but without challenge, worry or stress.

As retirement started getting closer, however, I realized that living in that place would not only be extraordinarily easy, it would be excruciatingly ordinary and boring.

What Fulfilled Retirees Have In Common

I had been reading a lot about what people do to get the most fulfillment from their retirement years. The most inspiring stories were of ones who’d taken retirement as an opportunity to try new things, push their boundaries and seek new horizons. They all intentionally lived (at least a portion of their lives) outside of their “comfort zones” — mental boundaries we construct to keep ourselves content, provide a sense of security and keep our anxieties low.

Because I’ve always had a passion for travel, the new horizons aspect of their lives was what appealed to me the most. So, in 2011, at age 50, I decided to sell everything I owned and travel the world.

I realize, to some people, that may seem impractical or a little radical, but it made sense to me. I had always dreamed of exploring new places and didn’t want to waste my new freedom by settling into a complacent rut little different from when I was working.

The Problem With Not Challenging Yourself

It is the unchallenging nature of comfort zones that, on the surface, tends to make them so appealing. The problem is that when we are unchallenged, we don’t try new things or unlock our hidden talents or potential.

Studies have proven that learning new and demanding things outside of our comfort zones (and maintaining an active social network) is key in keeping us sharp as we age. Merely exercising the mind with things that don’t push our boundaries, such as reading or puzzles, doesn’t necessarily improve cognitive function. It has to be new things that create a bit of anxiety, but offer potential rewards.

Himalayan Climbing and Cobra Eating

Since I retired, I have lived in four countries and visited many others. I love it. I have climbed to Tiger’s Nest Monastery high in the Himalayan Mountains of Bhutan, scuba-dived in the Indian Ocean and eaten the still-beating heart of a cobra in Vietnam (talk about stepping out of a comfort zone!). I have slept on mats in hill tribe villages and in five-star hotels and traveled by every conveyance possible, from private planes to horse carts.

Even when I am in my ever-changeable “home base,” I try to push my boundaries every day.

Learning new skills, making friends from around the world and putting myself out there by writing my Life Part 2 blog has made my world larger, more nuanced and flavorful (figuratively and literally). By pushing my boundaries, and getting out of my comfort zones, I have become more confident, less judgmental and more open to new ideas.

Challenging Your Comfort Zones Where You Live

It doesn’t have to be about climbing mountains, diving the oceans or challenging your palate with unusual things for you, though. There are thousands of ways to expand your horizons and challenge your comfort zones, even right where you live.

Getting started can be as simple as striking up a conversation with the neighbor you’ve seen for years but haven’t met. It could be as easy as looking on the Internet for a thespian group, joining a hiking club or learning to salsa.

Trying new things or even daring to look at our lives in different ways can be scary. But inaction created by fear or inertia robs us of the potential that results from trying new things.

Retirement is the perfect time to explore and take advantage of new opportunities. Comfort zones should be places where we go to relax, reflect and rejuvenate. They should not become permanent retirement destinations where we passively allow time to slip away.




© Twin Cities Public Television - 2016. All rights reserved.
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A Technophobe's Onetime Enemy Becomes a Long-Distance Lifeline

When your son moves halfway around the world, it's not 'who ya gonna call,' but how?

By Suzanne Gerber for Next Avenue

Credit: Monkey Business | Thinkstock

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with technology. When I got my first answering machine back in the '80s, it was with a mix of excitement (never missing another call!) and dread (but what if no one called?). I make no pretense of being an early adopter, but I pride myself in believing that I eventually do catch up. (Although my son will cringingly tell you that I still sometimes call my iPod a Walkman.)

Our kids are great at forcing us to keep up with the times. Years ago my son taught me the difference between ripping, burning, downloading and importing (and for a while there, I even remembered). He kept me current with cool websites (he was the first to turn me on to, for instance, Stumbleupon, Fark and Catsinsinks) and always had me upgrade software and do smart things like defark my computer.

Years ago he made me switch from my comfortable Internet Explorer browser to Firefox (which I kept calling Foxfire, partly to piss him off and partly because I’m partly dyslexic). He was about to trash my old Explorer desktop icon when I insisted he keep it there “just in case.” He did — and labeled it “I/E: USE FIREFOX.”

When he went away to college, I knew I was in for trouble, and had him leave me the same detailed instructions for watching videos that we’d leave for foreign guests, who were clueless about our systems, and his grandparents. I’m embarrassed to admit that more than once I still had to call him for further explanation.

A typical helpful exchange would go something like this. Me: “Rory, which machine should I play the DVD in and what do I set the TV to?” Him: “MOM! It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday night and I’m at COLLEGE. What’s wrong with this picture?” Me: “There’s nothing wrong with the picture, honey, I just can’t switch the TV to Video.” CLICK.

Oh, eventually I’d figure it out. He’s always been a great teacher that way, giving me the confidence to muddle my way through. Last summer he put those teaching skills to good use — and in the process unintentionally forced my biggest tech upgrade ever. He moved to Korea to teach English.

Korea is 6,885 miles (or 11,080 kilometers) away, the farthest apart we’ve ever been for more than a few weeks. It’s also 13 or 14 hours ahead (they don’t do daylight savings), and therein lies my greatest challenge of all.

At first he wrote long, delicious emails, describing everything he’d seen, done and, especially, eaten. (That part was less delicious: I’m a squeamish vegetarian, and he’s an omnivore without a hint of a dilemma.) He’d pen these riotously funny letters about cultural exchanges and miscommunications, the bulk of which seemed to have been found emblazoned on cute girls’ T-shirts (e.g., "Mono.B Nice To Me!"; "General Educate!").

And then the emails stopped.

When I used to travel regularly, I made a point of avoiding that dreaded yet ubiquitous outcropping of modern life, the Internet café, populated, as they always were, by colorful young people in headsets, yammering away in a Babel of cacophony. You might not be able to drink the water in a town or get electricity on demand in your “hotel,” but by gum, you could always get online in some Internet café. No matter how much I missed people back home, I was determined to never become one of those … Skypers. It felt a noisy and impersonal way to connect with a loved one.

But now that my son is 6,885 miles and 13 hours away, I’ve learned all the nuances of Skype (and gchat). For starters, I always know what time it is in Korea (5:04 am, thank you, though right now, all bets are off: He’s a Rangers fan — and if you don't know what that implies, it's not worth trying to explain). I always keep half an eye on my gchat list, waiting for his name to pop up. Skype stays open — with its constant annoying dings — in hopes of a cameo appearance.

The thing I loved to hate has become my parental lifeline. I’m also not ashamed to admit I own a Skype-compatible headset and actually have used it in … Internet cafés. Anything to talk to my boy.

I can’t begin to guess what new gizmos or apps are in the works that will make reaching out and connecting easier or quicker (or offer better quality). But if anyone in some high-tech R+D department is reading this and taking requests, could I make one? Can you invent a device that would let us hug?

© Twin Cities Public Television - 2016. All rights reserved.



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Why Having Cancer Made Me Stop Rushing

By Mark Nepo for Next Avenue

Credit: Thinkstock

The following is adapted from Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness by Mark Nepo. Published in November 2015 by Sounds True.

One of the great transforming passages in my life was having cancer in my mid-30s. This experience unraveled the way I see the world. It scoured my lens of perception, landing me in a deeper sense of living. There are certain experiences that reform us, as if God’s a tireless blacksmith who, against our pleading, forges the metal in us, though it takes years for our heart and mind to cool from the pounding. My journey with cancer was how I was forged.

If I learned anything from having cancer, it’s that unless there’s a physical need — such as needing air to breathe or needing to stop a wound from bleeding — there’s no reason to rush, no matter the level of urgency being showered on us by others.
It Is Up to Us

Each of us is driving our own train, and the trick is not to go so fast that everything blurs and yet to go steadily enough that we get somewhere; though there are times when not going at all is tantamount to arriving.

The violent speed of our age doesn’t help. In a world so mobile and transient we can wake up married in Atlanta and go to sleep divorced in Fort Worth; the game has become who can snatch a mouthful of seed and be on their way first. In a world where sophistication means we show nothing, the mind becomes as cold as a camera shutter, opening and closing rapidly so as not to let too much in. In a world that makes a fortress of objectivity, we avoid the one frontier that returns us to first-hand experience: our ability to care. In a world that deems simplicity as dull, patience as slothful, and compassion as entangling, we give up inroads to our very core if we can no longer empathize.
Stopping Is Not Enough

Succumbing to speed is a form of isolation that makes us feel inadequate, because we’re always falling short, always catching up. But stopping alone is not entering stillness, because stopping alone does not let who we are merge with where we are. Still, to stop and slow down is a beginning, because we start to find what matters when we stop rushing.

Rushing can be defined as any instance in which we move faster than we need to. As soon as we begin to rush, whether hurried by an overbearing parent to the dinner table or harried into a career choice by an artificial deadline of our own making, we become estranged from ourselves; that is, a hollow forms between our inner self and the self that’s rushing through the world. Once divided from our sense of aliveness, we lose contact with that kinetic border called wonder. This estrangement from our aliveness is the beginning of alienation. And though there are many ways to feed our estrangement, rushing out of congruence – out of being where we are – is as sure a path as any to the netherworld of half-living.
‘The Temporary Ease of Hiding’

Throughout our lives, we struggle with the temporary ease of hiding and the pain of never surfacing: hiding our feelings of insignificance in our ambitions for a life of fame, hiding our confusions at the complexities of life in principles we hope will swallow them, hiding our pain of honest suffering in a resignation that stills the heart. And all the while our experience of what is real gets away from us.

But if we were to hide who we are in who we are, like hiding a body in its skin, if we were to let things be and not make over their impact on us, all hiding would evaporate and the constancy of our self would be final, real and unequivocal in its majesty of flaws.
A Different Way to Live

When we can manage to live our own life, letting nothing real slip away, the larger ocean of life draws us with a magnetism all its own, the way a fish is drawn by light to a surface it can’t imagine.

If we dare not to rush, not to live any faster than we are ignited from within, if we dare to slow into true presence the many times we do rush, if we dare to hear each other’s needs, if we dare to accept the discomfort of not knowing what to do until it becomes the comfort of a perennial question – we might find that one life in its unmitigated fullness may be more than enough.

Copyright © 2015 by Mark Nepo.





© Twin Cities Public Television - 2016. All rights reserved.


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