Stepping Out of the Usual

Whenever I find it the hardest to stick with a book as I challenge myself to read more to improve my writing, other mediums would always be my alternative. Lately, I’ve been hoarding quite a number of magazines of diverse genres from health, cooking, writing, pets, even going back to my high school obsession, otaku mags.

This habit has never occurred to me before as I was a person who has affinity to the usual. However, in one of the interviews I read in The Writer’s Chronicle with Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State, he said:

Perhaps, I consider it as one of the life-changing reads I’ve ever had. Being the person who prefers staying inside my comfort zone especially in reading and writing, it was nothing short of a much needed wisdom (also, a correction) I had to encounter.

Evenson’s view breaks the walls of the common comfort we dwell in thinking if we stick alone to our kind of genre, it’ll get us closer to what we are looking for. Only to realize that without stepping out of it, our familiarity will eventually lead us to mediocrity. The kind of growth that goes downwards instead of upwards.

I love what he said in the last part of his interview.

While these two quotes are in the context of writing, isn’t it applicable too in other aspects of our lives? We have developed so many habits, created so many comfort zones that subconsciously, we have caged ourselves into a mindset that perhaps it’s best to stick with the usual than take risk and fail. Our comfort zones have become barriers to actually seeing the greater possibilities waiting out there.

To read eccentrically is to live daring to find out more of life beyond the definitions and outcomes we see in other people’s lives. We make the step of our comfort zones wisely and discover for ourselves who we are apart from the usual.

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