The Ever-Expanding Comfort Bubble

These days, Marina and I have a lot of time to simply sit and talk. As we look at the next few months of adventure and, beyond that, our married life together, something that's come up a few times is the idea of the comfort bubble. This is something that a mentor of mine used to talk about when I was growing up. He used this idea to talk about the limits that we set for ourselves, and our ability to push and expand these limits by introducing challenges and the unfamiliar into our lives. I'm willing to accept that this idea has perhaps had a greater influence on me than was ever intended. I get abnormally restless if my own limits hover around the same position for any extended period of time. Meanwhile, I have close friends who have relatively static and well-defined limits, within which they live quite fully and contentedly. I suppose we all have to strike our own balance.

To poke some fun, I decided to illustrate the approximate range of my current comfort bubble:


















Some of these points are directly linked to one another. For instance, my comfort with losing money on the stock market directly contributed to my confidence in cutting my own hair (though I've never gotten a good look at the back...). And as you can see, while I've now absorbed the ability to propose into my comfort bubble, and marriage is duly creeping its way in as well, I would at this point much rather eat a brain than have a kid.

Marina and I have done a fair bit of comfort-bubble expansion over the last couple of weeks. We're both more comfortable standing at the head of a classroom and giving a make-it-up-as-you-go lesson to a group of students who range over several grades in age and ability. Marina has mastered the chaos of the tro-tros and taxis that take her to and from the orphanage each day. We're able to keep our thoughts straight as we stroll down the street and people call out to us from all sides. We've gained a new appreciation for buckets, though we do occasionally have running water. We've discovered that our malaria pills don't cause such overpowering nausea if they're taken in the middle of a meal. When the power went out for 20 hours yesterday we hardly noticed. We're even getting comfortable with some of the UFOs (unidentified food objects) that appear in our meals from time to time. So it seems it's time for us to move on to some new challenges.

Today we'll be traveling to a small village north of here to start on two new projects. Marina will be working at another orphanage and school, and I'll be helping out with a microlending project at a community bank. We're both nervous and excited for the change. Again!
Now... here's hoping that in our new home we may continue to avoid the infamous squat toilet...

-Davis