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#214: Settle Into Your Comfort Zone

Dear friends

During the pandemic, I received an email from one of my favourite independent bookstores, Cape Town’s The Book Lounge, with an unusual proposition – ‘send us an email telling us what books you’ve enjoyed, and we’ll make a few recommendations’. I did and my world expanded. It has become an occasional treat. I send them my desired reading palette, ‘I would like a bit of this and with a splash of that’. They recommend and deliver. I pay and smile.

Our most recent exchange resulted in a package containing Palestinian intellectual giant, Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place, historian Joel Cabrita’s Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Twala and Saidiya Hartman’s multi-awarded Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (the awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction).

This week I extended the Book-Lounge-inspired-bubble-buster to my wine order and asked the wonderful folk of The Wine Cellar to include a few bottles they enjoyed. The consequence was that the Alinea Carignan 2022, BLANKbottle Retirement @ 65 2022, Bruyére Family Wines Aandster Syrah 2022 and L’Equinox Wines’ To Maike And The Rest 2022 are all waiting for meals to be cooked and friends to gather.

Thank you for last week’s messages. The idea of staying in our comfort zones resonated so strongly, I decided to settle in and enrich last week’s themes.  

/ strategy
Two weeks ago, I told you the sound of whales accompanied my pre-dawn work.

On Monday afternoon this playful pair made their presence known. The bay is everchanging (as these sunrises show).

Four days before the whales, we watched terrified as a National Sea Rescue Institute rescue boat approached a surfski buffeted by big swell and strong winds and then awed, and still terrified, as rescue swimmers, trailing safety cables, plunged off the boat into the boiling and freezing water.

The NSRI station commander described the conditions as ‘poor with fading light, gusting gale-force winds, whipping sea spray, 1 to 1.5-metre sea swells, white water wind chop sea swells, and near-blinding sea spray’.

We later learnt the surfski’s rudder cable had snapped. One paddler hung to its side whilst the other battled to keep it upright. It took several approaches before the boat was able to get close enough to rescue them, which they did, one severely hypothermic, but both ultimately safe.

After battling the swell at low speeds for life-saving minutes, the skipper could now open the throttle. They turned to the safety of Simons Town’s harbour and hammered home, waves washing over the boat’s bow.

I could’ve sworn it radiated pride for a job well done. Perhaps it was transmitting the spirits of those onboard, but on Thursday night I would’ve said the boat knew.

As the week unfolded, I watched countless videos of False Bay surfski adventuring. Part of paddling is at some point you will fall off and in.

Thanks to one adventurer’s GoPro, I watched as he first toppled and then tried to remount his surfski several times over five or six minutes. The positioning of the boat meant that he needed to re-enter it from his weaker left side.

He’d get in momentarily, before toppling out again. It’s a frustrating and increasingly scary experience in the Cape’s cold waters. You only have so long before hypothermia starts to blunt your brain. Eventually, he managed it.

Further along, he toppled again. This time, he took the time to reposition his ‘ski to get in from his favoured right side. On his first attempt, in under a minute,  he was back in. Easy. Off he went.

Most of us favour a side, left or right. You’ll remember that last week Buckingham and Goodall observed, “we learn most in our comfort zone, because that’s our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, and it’s where we are most creative and insightful.” 

It turns out that operating from your comfort zone can also save your life.

Find your comfort zone and work from there.  If you’re in deep water, don’t just act. Pause, think about your natural strengths, assess how you can use them to address the problem. It might, initially, take a little longer but you’ll be more effective in the end.

If your cable has snapped, and conditions are beyond your skill call for help – people are happy to. Remember, receiving gratitude is one of our favourite treats. Giving someone the chance to help you is an act of generosity.  

// self
Last week’s ‘self’ explored David Brooks’ essay, “You Might Be a Late Bloomer”. Remember, we’re settling.

I love reading writing about writing.

A few weeks ago, I came across writing advice given by acclaimed novelist Cormac McCarthy to marine biologist Roger Payne (in weird serendipity for today’s letter, Payne helped discover the song structure of humpback whales).

I was captivated by comments like “If you assume a low level of intelligence in the reader you will be left precisely with that readership. Is that really what you want?” and “This is all pretty words.”

It reminded me of one of my favourites, Elmore Leonard’s Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle, and so I went McCarthy mining.

Thanks to films like No Country for Old Men, The Road and All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy’s name has leached into popular consciousness. It wasn’t always that way.

Although he’d enjoyed critical success, before 1992’s ‘All the Pretty Horses’, he’d never sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies. He was 59.

Just three years before, he wrote to a friend, “I’ve been a full-time professional writer for 28 years, and I’ve never received a royalty check. That, I’ll betcha, is a record.”

There was a time where all his books were out of print.

Not only was commercial success long in coming, but he also started as a University of Tennessee dropout. Yet, there were signs. He had an editor who championed his work. He received several prestigious grants that helped him keep going. He persisted.

English professor, Dan Sinykin argues Cormac McCarthy Had a Remarkable Literary Career. It Could Never Happen Now and he may be right, but I prefer Brooks’ late bloomer possibility.

/// soul
Some of you may have tried last week’s exercise that we borrowed from Stephen Covey. Its intent is to inspire us to live consciously. The world has so much momentum. We hear and see so many tales about how we should live. Covey’s exercise helps us define what we want. 

James Hollis’ The Broken Mirror reminds us “Every day is a summons to larger life. Every day a combat between the forces of regression—to fall back into the sleep of naiveté, dependency, unconsciousness—and progression to carry on the mystery of our human incarnation further into the unknown but fallow fields of the possible human.”


Best wishes
 

Karl

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