Comfort…

What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?

I think Comfort was a character name on a Twilight Zone episode—#88, “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank,” to be specific. (I love that I can google that sort of thing.) She certainly was comfort for the devil who wanted to marry her…

But on to the prompt: This is a pretty vague question and, since it doesn’t specify physical or mental, I guess I have to respond to both.

Physically I spend many days helping around the house and garden. This includes lots of lifting, carrying, bending, squatting, and walking, including stairs. Methods of obtaining physical comfort include Motrin and Voltaren, for internal and external use, respectively. The stair-walking especially fits into my idea of exercise, since I don’t get to walk the exercise path every day,

As for mental comfort, that is harder to come by. I live in a house that is currently fraught, and one might say, surrounded, with a variety of mental health issues. (For privacy reasons, I won’t go into details, of course.) Having never had them myself, and having little experience dealing with them on a daily basis, I find myself in a discomfort zone in this regard. Sometimes a pause and deep breathing helps; sometimes, in my lack of understanding, I get impatient, which upsets any balance or comfort the day may have started with.

When I prepared students or myself for job interviews, I always told them to reply to, “What are you weaknesses?” with, “I think of them as challenges.” I know my challenge lies in this area, and improving my reaction to surges in anxiety and friction will go a long way into improving the comfort of those around me, and also my one comfort—as Hamlet would say, “A consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Suggestions for coping with mental health issues? Send them my way. And, as always, the daily prompt mantra: please like and follow!