How to Step Out of Your Comfort Zone 101

1. Meet and see awesome jewelry from a woman selling jewelry at restaurants
2. Exchange numbers because you forgot to bring cash and must have that necklace
3. Use exchanged numbers to organize an exchange of another kind
4. Run into that person repeatedly and get excited about their dream of expanding a back room one person operation into a much bigger picture
4. Say that you can help
5. Get repeated missed calls presumably about said help
6. Phone back when time and get asked whether you can help with a huge problem - wonderful jeweler needs a place to stay urgently with her son. They don't have a place even for the night
7. Stammer out a response that you will think about something and call back
8. Ponder the options. No one you know has a room. Think of what it would mean to have a total stranger "off the street" in a very settled single person "I live alone with no routines and a lock up and go lifestyle"
9. Ponder the other option, saying no but knowing that this person might be out in the cold and you can't have that on your conscience as you get into a nice warm bed.
10. Make a decision.
11. Phone and say OK, I will help you and ask the relevant and logistical questions about daily life routines and future plans.
12. Decide on a time for Thandi to come round with her son.
13. Get home and wait. Time passes and no sign of Thandi.
14. Entertain a passing thought that maybe they made another plan and wait some more
15. Can't stand the waiting and phone to find out what is happening
16. They are right outside your door
17. Let them in
18. Listen to their story and marvel at yet another assumption made that has been obliterated about a certain 'type' of person
19. Reevaluate totally the transience of "stuff" and the true feeling of deciding to have faith in a total stranger, to trust in a total stranger and to regain a sense of community that perhaps in our fast paced self centric urban lives has been missing
20. Realize that there is something greater at work here
21. Lessons need to be learnt about opening up to strangers and realizing that they are not strange at all

And wham, you are out of your comfort zone with little stirrings of emerging lessons in life. This will be an ongoing topic as there is so much more to this situation than I am able to write in yet another long entry!