On Comfort

There’s great comfort to be found in routine. When you’re distressed or even actively freaking out, performing actions you’ve performed a thousand times before can be calming. Familiar objectives are good to have when uncertainty rules other areas of your life: even though not all who wander are lost, the journey can in many ways be better when you know where you’re going.

When we are comfortable, we feel good; the transition stage between feeling not good and feeling good is comforting. Comfort can be both a peak experience — think of what it feels like to sink into a hot tub after a long day working hard — and an ongoing state, a lifestyle. While we seldom go blind to peak experiences, it is entirely possible to lose regard for the ones enjoyed on a nearly perpetual basis. Should those comforts disappear for whatever reason, though, we becomes acutely aware of their true value within our life.

Comforting is a verb. To make someone else feel better most generally takes action; people, especially those who are actively having a rotten time, gain little from what happens solely inside your head and heart. Comforting can be an act of restoration. This can happen on a physical level — someone’s roof has blown off in the wind, you help them replace it — or it can happen emotionally — those cup of coffee conversations where one friend assures another that yes, you have value. You have love. You are cherished.

Comforting is solidarity performed. This is very important to know when the problem is one that can not be fixed. Death is the big one here, but there are others. We all grieve sometime; there can be comfort found in the fact we do not grieve alone.

Different people find different things comforting. It’s good to know what works for you, as an individual, so you can ask for what you need when you need it. You would think this would be intuitive knowledge, but no — it can take some real study to determine what things actually make you feel better when you feel bad and what things just seem like they do. And when it comes to comforting other people? It’s a trial and error process; begin in kindness and do what you can.