Moving Out of Your Comfort Zone

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night the play is based on three main characters, Viola, Olivia, and the Duke. The Duke and Oliva spend most of the entire play in their houses, never moving, unlike Viola who acts as an intermediary between the two. Because of this component of mobility, the entire plot is based on what these characters are able to see and not see. This proves that sometimes going out of one’s comfort zone and exploring your surrounds enables you to understand more, and thus really seeing the big picture. This is something I encountered recently while volunteering with FOH. FOH is a program that houses men who were at some point living on the streets of Baltimore, involved with drugs or alcohol. FOH helps the men clean up and find jobs and homes, acting as a half-way house. Every Wednesday, along with a group of other Loyola students, I spend time with members of FOH, sometimes playing board games, watching a movie, playing football, or like this past Wednesday we went bowling. FOH is situated in the city of Baltimore in between Fells Point and the Inner Harbor, so we went a bowling alley located in Dundalk, which is right outside the city. The volunteers broke up into two cars, two other girls and I in one car, and four other students in another car. We had very unreliable directions, and no clue as to where exactly we were going, all we knew was the lanes were located a good hour away from Loyola. So after we drove past Johns Hopkins, through the city, passed the train station, and other familiar places and into West Baltimore, we started to worry no longer being in a familiar area, and not knowing where we were going. I have never been in West Baltimore, so it was something very new to me. Luckily the other two students and I who were in car were not too worried, being we have all been in other “bad” areas of Baltimore, volunteering. But thinking to myself, I felt that if I never stepped out of the “Loyola bubble” and into other places beyond the Inner Harbor and Johns Hopkins, into the “real Baltimore,” I would have probably been shocked at what I saw. Most of West Baltimore is poverty stricken, with Baltimore City Police patrolling every corner. One particular site stuck out in my mind of a young boy most likely still in high school, walking on the sidewalk pushing who seemed to be his brother in a wheelchair, looking as if they were too poor to have adequate health care. Just seeing this site made me want to do something to help them, yet I felt so useless. It was hard looking around and seeing so many people, who must have it hard, and seeing their homes and knowing that I was only there because I could not find my way to a bowling alley. Its funny how sometimes you learn so much more about your extended surroundings when you least expect it. Just getting lost in West Baltimore made me understand more about the growing problem of poverty here, and made me appreciate more what I have, and see how much worse off I could be. We finally made it to the bowling alley, two hours later and a tour of West Baltimore. But for some reason, after leaving the bowling alley I was not thinking of the six spares and four strikes I bowled, or how much fun I had with the men of FOH, I was just thinking of West Baltimore, and how it seems like another world, just minutes away. Sometimes getting lost is what all you need to gain new insights on your surroundings and see that not everyone is in the same situations as yourself, something which makes me more appreciative.