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Idiom: A fish out of water
Fish live in water; that’s where they’re most comfortable.
If we put a fish in a situation without water, it would feel uncomfortable.
That’s what today’s phrase a fish out of water means – to be uncomfortable in a particular situation.
Most of us have a natural affinity or aptitude for certain things.
Some people thrive in high-pressure situations, while others feel right at home giving a speech in front of hundreds.
If we were to take someone else, though, and put them in those situations, they would feel like a fish out of water.
We all have a specific situation in which we thrive and another in which we do not.
There’s a great quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of former US President Theodore Roosevelt: “Do one thing every day that scares you.“
I wholeheartedly agree with Mrs. Roosevelt on that, but I also think we need to do things that make us uncomfortable, not necessarily scared.
When she said that, she meant that we must get outside our comfort zone to achieve real personal growth.
Running around each day like a chicken with its head off acting busy doesn’t mean we are improving anything, especially ourselves.
When we put ourselves in challenging situations where we feel like a fish out of water, we genuinely get to know and surpass our limitations.
Now, of course, we don’t want to go overboard with it.
The trick is to find that sweet spot where we are just scared or uncomfortable enough to challenge ourselves and learn from that adversity.
The level of pollution in the world today is doing just that.
We’re being challenged to change our ways.
Sure, change will make us feel like fish out of water for a while, but if we don’t change, we’ll end up like real fish on dry land—deathly uncomfortable.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 70.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.