Gustavo Perez turns nine today.

For those of you joining the story in progress, I've been feeding the homeless for over ten years now, having survived a near fatal attack at the park in 2013. This precipitated this blog as I've discussed my recovery. A summary of the details of the attack that can get you caught up fairly quickly can be found at:  http://samstabbed.blogspot.com/2019/03/gustavo-perez-turns-six-today.html You are free to read other posts in this blogs as you see fit. 

Today is the ninth anniversary of that attack. My posts have become relatively infrequent, but I will probably continue to post every anniversary.

This past year I spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of comfort. The modern definition according to Oxford is as follows:

1. 1.

   a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint.

   "room for four people to travel in comfort"
2. 2.

   the easing or alleviation of a person's feelings of grief or distress.

   "a few words of comfort"

The meaning of the word has evolved. It's become synonymous with the word leisure. C.S. Lewis addresses this evolution with the following quote:

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” 

However, comfort, "cum fort" meant to be with strength. To be comforted is to capable of dealing with whatever comes our way. I've worked on embracing this truth, and it prompted me to look back at a choice I made twenty years ago when I chose to pursue comfort/leisure as a coping mechanism for dealing with untruths I'd come to believe about myself. 

I'm pretty close to being eligible for Social Security and I've begun to contemplate what retirement means to me. The reality is that I probably need to keep working in some way for the rest of my life. While I'm OK with this, this probably limits a lot of my choices when it comes to things like housing - and dating. So be it. 

But I Was Good!!!!

About four months before the attack, I moved back into South Pasadena, and I lived near an intersection where two lanes split into four, with the two left lanes become a highway entrance and the two right lanes allow one to turn north. The right lane is dedicated to heading north, and the left lane splits into three lanes.  (For those of you familiar with South Pasadena, I'm referring to where Grevelia dead ends into Fair Oaks Ave. at the 110 entrance.) 

A couple of months before my attack, I was heading west on Grevelia in the left lane intending to turn right and go north up Fair Oaks. As I did so, a car from the right lane swerved across my path, forcing me to hit the brakes. The car then continued left, entered the right highway lane and then got onto the highway. I hit the horn for about five seconds. This drew the attention of a policeman who pulled me over. I explained what happened, and his response caught me completely by surprise: "People drive like shit around here. Hit the horn once and move on." The officer then let me go and as I drove off, one thought dominated: "But I was good!"; I had observed vehicle code, and I was the one who'd been pulled over and admonished by the police!  

But as I drove on, I began to consider the source of my outrage. At one level, yes, I was upset at getting pulled over even though I'd committed no violation of any sort, but my deepest sense of outrage came from the idea that this other driver had violated *my* personal standard of courtesy - and had done so deliberately! The reality was that this driver had no idea who I was, and would have done the same thing to anyone else. I had personalized the event and was drawing offense due to the personalization. This realization prompted me to begin to explore how I'd been personalizing lots of people's actions and how that affected my overall outlook in such a negative way. 

And then I got stabbed at the park about eight weeks later and nearly died. It's clear to me now that had I not gotten pulled over, I might still be personalizing what had happened. Instead, as the police began relaying to me information about my assailant, it became clear to me that my assailant had issues and was clearly carrying around a lot of pain and anger which had been displaced on me, and my overriding response has been one of empathy.