Getting outside our comfort zone

This week I spent a few days in Los Angeles seeing friends, attending a benefit, shooting a video and discussing future work projects, including a film that is completely outside my area of interest, sphere of influence or knowledge and quite frankly, outside my comfort zone.

The topic is completely foreign to me–so much that I almost blew it off when it was first pitched to me and didn’t give it much attention. It was a topic I didn’t know anything about, an era I wasn’t interested in, and quite frankly, a people I had no connection to.

Then I stopped, re-read the script from a different perspective and spend time with the project’s writer and chief producer, James Manos.

I tore down my own “comfort walls” and allowed my mind to listen to a different style of music… (Literally, and figuratively)… music that I didn’t understand, but grew to love, since I was finally willing to even listen to it.

I read about a culture that I knew nothing about and delved deeply into a woman’s soul, who at the end of the day, it didn’t matter where she came from. Scared at first to embrace something different, foreign and unknown to me– it’s been amazing ride so far.

All my life, everything and anything I’ve ever done has had some kind of Greek connection. I never looked at anything else or was interested in exploring, in detail, another culture. Greek was comfortable to me.

But pain, passion and personal tragedy, which are the main characters of this latest project, are universal. And when you’re able to free your mind– or rather to “open” it to other things that may not be “comfortable” to you at first, it’s amazing what you’ll learn.

Of course… It was a Greek (albeit a self-professed disenfranchised one) who took me out of the Zorba dance and is teaching me how to Salsa… So I guess there is a Greek connection after all. Thank you James Manos.