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.a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint."room for four people to travel in comfort"
- 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.
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