A Comfort That I Will Never Know

I am sitting alone on my morning commute to school, running through what I have to accomplish for the day when a mother with two young children get on the bus. The mother gets more frustrated as the bus chugs along and her kids get fidgety and louder. As the kids jibber-jabber in Italian, I cannot help but think about what a comfort it is to confidently speak in your own language in your own country. They are too young to know that the world does not revolve around them and it will break their hearts more than a few times. They are perfectly content being loud and causing their mom some frustration on their daily commute to their destination.

At that moment I was jealous of those children. Jealous that I would never know the comfort of speaking Italian and making my mom frustrated with me yelling at my sibling on a Metro bus in Rome. Jealous that I had such an inaptitude for the Italian language due to my upbringing. Jealous that a child can do something better than I can even dream of doing right now. This jealousy turned into frustration and I was transported to what the mother was feeling in that exact moment- wanting to get off that bus as soon as possible.

As the children and their mother got off the bus, I was snapped back to the reality of my privilege to feel those emotions. I was jealous of a small child of the comfort that they had when I was born, raised, and live with almost the highest amount of comfort that a human could have. I lived a life where I did not have to worry about food, shelter, education, and a laundry list of other items. I grew up in Small Town USA where I always felt safe and had a support system that now stretches continents. I realized that my privilege has made me chase the feeling of uncomfortableness through travel, surrounding myself with people who have opposite viewpoints of me, and moving across the globe.

I got off the bus and the first person I saw was a homeless man begging for change. He probably has never felt comfortable in a very long time and here I am, studying abroad in a foreign country through a program that is offered through my private college education, being jealous of the comfort of a child. I then start wondering why I even chase this feeling of uncomfortableness when I could so easily fall back into a cushion of comfort through my age, demographic, race, identity, faith and so many other things that makeup who I am. To be slightly gentle and kind to myself, I do have to reflect and say that my jealousy was probably due to me being out of my comfort zone for almost a month. This brings me to wider and tougher questions:

Why do we chase being uncomfortable sometimes and avoid it at other times? Is our comfort zone a bad place to be? How far out do we push ourselves until it is unhealthy for us and those around us?

“We do not learn from experience… We learn from reflecting on experience” -John Dewey