Importance of breaking out from comfort zone

Generalisation is a human nature. Often in life it is somewhat convenient to categorise others and put them inside a box. But it becomes dangerous when you start categorising yourself, resulting to limitations in your own life experiences.

I never thought I would find myself in middle of a pole dancing workshop. That is not to say, I had anything against pole dancing. But you know... I had no special interest in pole dancing, why would I take time out of my week and fit pole dancing between work, family time, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, down time for myself, catching up with friends, exercising... (the list goes on)?

Yesterday, an awesome friend of my, N (single) invites me to share the celebration of her 27th birthday and her recent passion for pole dancing. Little did I know what I signed up to, I went expecting an end of semester performance by her pole dancing class. Rereading the invitation again would help in the future. When I showed up, my first hint was there are no seats for audiences. Still, I did not expect myself to be doing any dancing. For one, I am out of tune when I sing, if I dance I will be most definitely be out of rhythm. For two, I initially told Nikki that I would like to watch, and Nikki said watching is fine. See? There is no reason that I should be involved with dancing.

It was not long till I realised everyone who turned up is Nikki’s friend, and not part of her pole
dancing class. Some like me showed up expecting to watch, while other showed in gym wear ready for pole dancing. Due to the small number of people who came to dance, the teacher encouraged us all to pick a pick and dance along.

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed watching the promiscuous side of everyone, and laughing at people when they make a fool of themselves. It was just nice to exercise and mentally loosen up. At the same time, the experience has bought to my attention the amount of muscle that I have neglecting in my everyday living.

 It got me thinking about all the different classes out there that I can be signing up to, and new people I can meet. Why have I not yet? Why is it that Nikki can make the time and I can’t?

Well, there is something I do not want to admit: when I am free, I spend time to my boyfriend. So do I spend too much time with Mr Boyfriend? Certainly not according to him, and I do not think so either. We only see each other on the weekends, and call in the evenings during the week. There is no standard for how much time one should spend with their significant other, therefore there is no such thing as too much or too less time that you spend together. But regardless how much time you spend together, it is still time. It is still time out of a lifetime, time out of a limited span of time.

 People in relationship will have less time to explore whether it is to a slight extent or enormous extent. It makes me wonder why I have not ever appreciated it when I was single. It seems that you need to have been in a relationship in order to know how to be single. You need to know where all the relationship constraints are, in order to take full advantage of all your single privileges.

Perhaps this is where the 80/20 rules comes in. The rule states that approximately 80% of the production comes from 20% of the activity. Maybe I only need to be a girlfriend 20% of the times. 80% of the time should be spent on me. Because there are so many things I want to expose myself to before I die. There is so much I have not seen, yet alone done in this whole wide world. I refuse to let my youth go just like that.