C O N S ID E R IN G .
..
I fin d that the firings I value more and more
are those that comfort and challenge a t once.
/
\
IN
DEFENSE
OF THE
COMFORT
ZONE
E S S A Y B Y
For reasons that remain a mystery to me, comfort seems to have
gotten a bad name recently. Whether it’s a yoga stretch or an artistic
enterprise, we are urged continually to get out of our comfort zone;
getting “too comfortable” with an idea, a material, a relationship,
a mode of work resonates with staleness, inertia, creative fatigue.
All of which seems curious. I don’t know about you, but the comfort
zone is pretty much exactly where I want to be.
Because as I see it, comfort has something to do with physical
expectancy in the material world. When you reach for a doorknob
or light switch, when the handle of a mug fits your hand just so,
when the seat and back of a chair conform to your body, that is to
say, the hundreds, maybe thousands, of times each day when you
expect to find something where it is and then do—
that’s what gives
you your bearings.
Finding things where we expect them to be offers no small com-
fort; it gives us an abiding sense of reassurance, possibly because
it implies a sense of fit with our surroundings. The message is that
it may be possible to find a sense of reciprocity, some sense of mu-
tual accommodation, with the external world. It gives us a sense of
belonging and confirms the fact that we have arrived at an agree-
ment with the material world. It’s hard to dispute such an agreement.
Consider Flaubert’s proposal that one “be regular and ordinary in
your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in
your work”—as good an argument for predictability as you’re ever
likely to find.
I think of this every time I sit down to dinner at the cherry table
made by my husband, cabinetmaker Brian Johnston. Its surface is at
just the right level, 29 inches from the floor. Six and a half feet long,
thirty-two inches wide, it seats six comfortably, eight intimately.
The rich grains of its surface have been polished and waxed, but its
shine comes from years of use as well. In all of this, it does what a
dinner table must do; it constructs a place of civility. In his “ Ode to
the Table” Pablo Neruda serenades the trustworthiness of the “ti-
tanic quadrupeds, they sustain our hopes and our daily life.” Ours
is just such a table.
But an occlusion on one of the legs signals some violent rupture
in the tree’s growth, a blemish caused by an insect, possibly, or the
036 american craft oct/novo9
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