Flying Like A Bird or Setting Like the Sun
What brings you comfort?
Close your eyes partly or fully, or as much as you feel comfortable doing, take a nice breath in, and out, and taste the air. Just enjoy being nowhere but here for a moment. Then let come to mind a time you felt a deep sense of comfort. What was the situation? Where were you? Were you by yourself or with others? What were you doing? Notice what comfort means to you.
When I think about this question, I realize the answer has changed throughout my life. As a child, I remember walking my dog in the wooded area in our neighborhood. Sometimes, we’d take off on a run and all else would be forgotten. All that existed was us, running, together.
During my college years, when I returned home to visit my parents in New York City, I remember late nights, after everyone else was asleep and the city had quieted, my mother and I would sit and talk, openly, like at no other time.
When I first moved to Ithaca, my future wife and I lived with a group of people near a gorge and waterfall. I’d go out and stare into that waterfall, I’d see first the flow of water. Then my perspective would shift to focus on one drop, one amongst the multitude, racing down, crashing, disappearing into the current of the creek. Any tension I had previously felt, any thoughts, would be washed away. I’d be left emotionally calm and mentally clear.
Now, after getting up and doing basic exercises and stretching, I love to sit with a book that inspires or challenges me. It is a grave mistake to think of reading as an automatic or passive activity that involves simply repeating in your mind someone else’s words. When you give reading your full attention you get to see the world with someone else’s eyes. And this new perspective illuminates depths missed in yourself. Without a quality reading, the quality of the writing is never perceived. This is why holding a book can feel like holding a mystery or a treasure chest. Reading online or with a kindle doesn’t do that for me no matter the content. In fact, it turns me off.
Or writing⎼ I love to write stories, blogs, poems, etc. in the morning, when my mind is fresh. The words enable me to transform into other people, or to fly like a bird, to rain and snow and set like the sun or cuddle with a cat. Creativity can be so satisfying.
And meditating is a different sort of comfort, one that exposes the quiet in the light, vision in the eyes, maybe a smile in the lips.
Or at night, sitting with my wife and pets, just looking at them, feeling they want to be there with me⎼ the joy they take in my company makes my company so comforting to me.
Or there was that day many years ago that I got a phone call. Someone I had recently met had decided to stop using drugs and needed someone to help them through the night. They couldn’t get into a rehab facility soon enough. I’m not sure why they chose me. That night wasn’t comfortable for either of us. It was so painful. But it shocked me into realizing what could happen if I couldn’t find comfort in my own mind.
And after four years of the trauma of DT and one year of the pandemic, I take comfort in an administration in Washington that shows a concern for the health of the people of this nation, that uses science to direct their actions, and values democratic principles and processes. And the vaccine⎼ I take comfort in the vaccine.
There were times in the past I felt comfort was too bourgeois or privileged, that before I could let myself be comfortable, I had to do something spectacular first. Or I felt comfort was too small a wish or a goal for life. But then I realized ⎼ comfort is not opposed to depth or challenge or compassion or creativity but included in all of them. That I needed to feel comfortable about feeling uncomfortable. That after a moment of heartrending anguish, a moment of comfort can sustain me and supply the strength to go on.
If you live with others, find your own personal way to feel caring and comfortable with them⎼ and help them feel caring and comfortable with you. Give to yourself so you can give to others. Give to others so you feel the power to give at all.
The Greater Good Science Center has an interview with researcher and professor Kristen Neff and psychotherapist Christopher Germer on “How to be A Friend to Yourself.” Learning to extend to ourselves the compassion that we might more readily extend to others is liberating and important not only for our own mental and physical well-being, but for others we meet.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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