Where there is discomfort there is growth

Yesterday I had the authentic German experience.

I woke up after an overnight coach in Hamburg. I had a few hours to kill before the train arrived.

Well, it turns out I had longer than that. My train was delayed. At the beginning it said by 30 minutes. No big deal I thought. Until it got delayed again, by 20 minutes. And again. Eventually it came 80 minutes later.

The experience was a testing one for my level of zen.

I had woken up from my coach with a mediocre level of sleep. I felt caught unawares of my surroundings. I’m usually someone who is very conscious about where I am, yet here I suddenly was in Germany, a country I somewhat have forgotten about over the last year.

I felt like I had hit a bit of a blindspot. I do travel a fair bit, yet recently this has mainly been through countries that I speak the language and know pretty well. I barely count going to London as travel since it’s just going back to my parent’s home.

I noticed that I had an extra level of vigilence to my surroundings. I remembered small points around road crossings being far stricter in Germany and that you had to wait for the green sign. I felt a lot more exposed as well with not understanding the language.

Waiting for the train was generally okay, but it was a test of patience. When I got on it though there were a lot of announcements in German which I didn’t really understand. I had brought a bigger luggage which didn’t actually fit properly in the overhead spaces. I put it in as best I can and I didn’t feel it was particularly secure.

At one point it actually fell down mid train ride and caused quite a ruckus. In the past I would probably have felt super embarrassed by this, though here I carried on quite industriously and moved it to a space at the front of the carriage. People around me settled down.

Later, one of the conductors told me I couldn’t leave my luggage where I put it. When I asked where I could put it, she replied in German basically just telling me to move it. I tried shifting it to a place which was less out of the way. Later I saw the conductor move my luggage across to the other side of the carriageway.

It’s a little bit embarrassing to admit, but I thought I might have been put into some sort of ‘naughty space’ because I had done something wrong. I had this anxiety building, to the point where I ended up checking where it was after. It turns out that she had just put it in a space on the other end. Perhaps it would have been nice for her to tell me, but at least I noticed her moving it anyway.

In the end the travel was fine. But my experience brought out quite a lot of interesting things.

I noticed that I generally want to be a good citizen/customer. I try rather a lot to do so. Whilst this sounds like a positive trait, I’m not really sure it always is. In a world where lots of people don’t seem to care so much about the rules, the level of extra energy (and often anxiety) I place at doing things right seems quite mismatched to the world.

This totally corresponds to a profile of an Autistic person – I like to follow rules. But in a world where the rules often don’t make sense and many people don’t follow them anyway, it’s not actually in my interest to care so much about them. It’s actually where a lot of Autistic people get stuck.

The other thing I noticed about myself was how important it is for me to understand my surroundings. My brain went into overdrive the moment I walked out of my coach and into the cold air of Hamburg. I become hypervigilant of people and the way things worked. I wanted to make sure I didn’t accidentally do something wrong. I noticed a lot of these prompts were based upon fear, rather than curiosity.

For a lot of people, the point of growth when travelling is to open our minds. For me, it’s probably the opposite. It’s to relax, and not get so caught up in mimicking the behaviour of the people around me.

I haven’t lost sight of the fact that my ability to blend into new spaces has served me extremely well through my life. It’s allowed me to navigate different cultures, languages and countries with relative ease. Yet it can also be a way in which I lose touch with myself as I reflect other people’s behaviour rather than my own.

The key point here is that the discomfort I experienced was life’s way of demonstrating that the way I operated which was creating additional stress.

So by examining the stress, I can see that a shift in my mindset can actually make such experiences actually a lot more enjoyable. For me, that means becoming more comfortable with the unknown, and getting back in the habit of experiencing it.

In fact, we can go even further and love this process. Life is giving me a gift with these new challenges, and it’s showing me ways in which I can grow further. It’s something I’ve been telling myself a lot recently – love the process.

Each of us have particular challenges, and that’s okay. The more we embrace them, the more we grow.

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