Comfort

I work for a couple of places as a tutor. I was working with a student earlier today (this was true when I started this post, now it's a couple of days ago) and while working through one of the assignments, a student asked for clarification on an unfamiliar word and the subsequent discussion went off on a tangent to the word 'comfort', which prompted me to google the word which produced the definition, and I also found myself going through a webpage that had quotes on the topic of comfort.

The thrust of these quotes were about the lure of comfort, some quotes acknowledging how comfort dictated their choices, while others spoke against the lure, touting the importance of leaving one's 'comfort zone' in order to truly live/enjoy life. A quote by C.S. Lewis went quite a bit further in this direction. I've read of lot of his writings, but I'd never seen this quote before:

"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."

The modern definition of comfort has two distinct meanings, and Lewis addressed them both:

noun 

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 meanings share a common goal - a relief from pain. 

Given the timing since the last post about truth, this doesn't seem like a coincidence. Exposure to truth is often uncomfortable. If this is the first post in my blog you're reading, then I need to mention that I took a fifteen (15) year sabbatical from meaningful work, which would have been longer except I ran out of money (and I lost $50k learning how to trade foreign currency (FOREX) - and I actually know how to do it, but my limited universe of facts at the time compelled me to make the same kind of bad choices over and over), and it took another five years to reach a point of relative financial stability. I've never had a good explanation for why I did it, but now I can see that it was a response to all the pain I'd been carrying, and I sought to create a refuge from all of it. 

This is a choice we all have to face - deal with the unpleasantness that comes with some truth, or try to seek comfort. 

Someone wrote something that's always resonated me, although it now seems even more profound, even though I can't quite clearly articulate why quite yet. Unfortunately I need to paraphrase it and I suspect that something will be lost in translation: When you find yourself lying there bleeding at the bottom of the pit, you instinctively will want to stop the bleeding. Resist that instinct.