Step Outside Your Comfort Zone: 101 Stories about Trying New Things, Overcoming Fears, and Broadening Your World by Amy Newmark

Author:Amy Newmark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul

A Greyhound Encounter

In helping others, we shall help ourselves, for whatever good we give out completes the circle and comes back to us.

~Flora Edwards

When I tell people I’m shy, they tend not to believe me. I don’t come across as a quiet, introverted person, but there is more to shyness than that. I do love to meet new people, make new friends and help a stranger here or there, but I am usually hindered by my anxiety, which prevents me from going over and making an effort.

That was why a seemingly innocuous encounter on the Greyhound bus meant so much to me. It showed me that I could indeed get past myself and reach out.

It was an overnight trip from Ohio to New York, and I was taking it with a few friends of mine from the boarding school I was attending. I was headed home to surprise my family for the holidays and was pretty excited about it.

We settled into our seats for the long ride ahead, well-stocked with candy and an optimistic pillow or two. The passengers formed quite the motley assortment, a microcosm of our great, diverse nation. The bus slowly settled down for the night, as each of us tried to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. A majority of us tried finding comfortable sleeping positions as a peaceful silence descended upon the lumbering bus.

And then, the silence was pierced by a decidedly unhappy wail. It was an infant, and he was crying. Loudly. His father attempted desperately to shush him, but to no avail. He seemed unsure of what to do, how to handle this precious bundle in his arms. And he was all alone.

I wondered what would cause a man so young to be traveling alone with an infant. My heart went out to him; he looked ready to cry himself. And that baby just broke my heart.

So I turned to my friends, and with a conviction so unlike me, I said, “I am going to that baby!”

They looked at me like I was crazy and then proceeded to tell me that I was. I believed them, truthfully. This was so beyond my comfort zone that I couldn’t even see my comfort zone with binoculars.

But there was a baby. And he was crying. And that was all that mattered.

So I took a step out of my comfortable seat and a running leap outside my comfort zone and I approached that hapless dad.

“Here, let me try,” I said.

His look echoed my friends’, but his had the extra element of sheer desperation. He looked around the bus, almost as if to ensure that it was okay to entrust his baby to a stranger, and saw that there was nowhere for me to go anyway. He shrugged and wordlessly handed the baby to me.

I took the distraught boy back to my seat and slowly began rocking him in my arms. I sang the lullaby I had grown up with in his ears.

We made quite the sight — me, an Orthodox young woman singing the age-old Jewish bedtime song to an African-American infant.

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