A Comfort zone is defined as a place or situation where one feels safe or at ease and without stress.

On our podcast interviewing Umberto di Venosa earlier this  month, he spoke about how much he encourages people to get out of their comfort zone as they walk the Camino de Santiago. Walking 500 miles across a country with only a backpack is definitely out of the average person’s comfort zone. He also used the phrase ‘your personal Everest.’ I’ve been thinking about that for the past few weeks. What is my personal Everest and for that matter, what exactly is my comfort zone?

The last 10 years I have led a fairly unusual life. I have made decisions that, to many people, would be considered… well, not usual. I decided to first walk the Camino in 2013 when not many Americans really even knew what it was. At the age of 43, I left my corporate job to travel, selling everything I owned, and bought a one-way ticket to Europe. I travelled solo for fifteen months with only a backpack and just my starting destination mapped out. When I returned from my travels, I decided to design a tiny house with my father and hired a contractor to help me build it so I could continue to pursue my art rather than return to corporate America.

You would probably assume that most of the latter was ‘outside my comfort zone.’ I have realized in the past few years that in stepping out of the ‘norm’ and taking those chances, my comfort zone has morphed. It changed almost without me being aware. In actuality, I am the most carefree when I am in some foreign country, eating new foods and living out of my backpack.

It is only now, with nowhere to go or a new place to explore, in the lockdown of COVID, that I find my comfort zone being stretched and challenged. 

The comfort that most people associate with home somehow brings me anxiety… and stress. I perhaps feel more responsibilities at home. I feel the weight of adulthood, retirement, and all the things I ‘should’ be doing to be secure as I begin the last year of my 40’s. 

Security is something Americans place very high on the importance scale. It’s hard to live  in the US and simultaneously practice living in the moment. Every move you make someone is asking you, nay demanding you, to think about the future. 

When I was traveling, I lived in the moment. I know it’s cliche, but things become cliches because they are true. When I am living in the moment, I take less for granted and I dream more easily. I refuse to live in fear. I am open to divine mystery, unexpected relationships, and epiphany and revelation.

Now, for all this wonderment, traveling is not always easy. I blogged my entire time traveling and shared my struggles, depression, and loneliness on the regular. Life on the road or in a foreign country isn’t always  a gleaming Instagram post. It is, however, a place I felt I fit. Not because others allowed me to fit in, but because I was choosing the direction and destination of my life on a daily basis. 

All this to say, I think I have discovered my ‘personal Everest’ is continuing to remember the person I am when I am in my comfort zone and become that person here and now. To sit in the uncomfortable day after day and choose to be the woman who is still open to divine mystery, to unexpected relationships, and to epiphany and revelation. To choose those things over fear even when everything in the here and now feels hard and sometimes so very very dark.

That desire is essentially why we started Pilgrim Lost. It is why we continue to have these conversations about wholeness and simplicity. It is why we share practices that help us grow and change. It is because we want and need to become the people we unearthed while walking the Camino. It is what being a pilgrim is all about. Every day we struggle to step into the phrase that we coined when we started this podcast - life in hopeful motion.

I am glad you are along for the journey.