from the pen of icarus blake

I missed yesterday’s prompt because of its eyerolling assumption of comfort as king.  I needed to sleep on it, consider why it made me groan aloud when I first saw it at 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday.

There is nothing wrong with curling up on the couch, tucked away from the heat of the outdoors with a book in your hand and some iced coffee on the table.  That’s one of the ways I like to spend my summer days off.  It is undeniably comfortable.  Likewise, there is nothing wrong with the blankets and pillows piled in the hollow beneath my loft bed for napping and lounging — which is the most comfortable feature I’ve ever added to my living space and will remain constant until my knees are too creaky to handle the staircase up to the loft.  There is nothing wrong with these things.

But at the same time, when I was in college I’d take the bus everywhere even though I had a car and the money to pay for parking.  I’d trudge through sleet and hail, stand at muddy bus stops with strangers, cram onto crowded buses in the dark winter months.  I had a comfortable option that I eschewed regularly for the uncomfortable one — in fact, my mother offered me money at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to stop taking the bus and I wouldn’t.  I would lug my backpack the ten minute walk to the bus stop, then twenty minutes across campus, and I was happiest that way.  In the cold.

Every summer, I go camping.  Often with my mother and brother, who have upgraded their camp digs to a small RV complete with bathroom and kitchenette.  They get me my own site, where I set up my three person Walmart tent with a hole in the side for electrical cords that I closed with fraying duct tape five years ago in Utah.  I sit at the fire with them, then when we finally get tired, I sleep on the forest floor with my dog while they retreat to their plush beds in their climate-controlled RV.  I could reduce my discomfort — I could set up the back of my car as a bed.  I could get a bigger tent, one that fits a cot.

At some point, comfort becomes monotony.  A barrier between myself and the world I inhabit that acts as cling wrap.  I watch the snow fall out my windows, but I never make snow angels because getting snow down the back of my coat is uncomfortable.  I never jump in the lake to cool off on a hot day because I’m scared I’ll be touched by the things that live in the water I am only visiting, brushing against my legs and reminding me that I am not the only thing in this world that lives and breathes and feels.  I numb myself before a tattoo so that I get only the artwork on my skin, and not the pain that comes with it.  Comfort becomes cotton shoved in your ears, the uneasy drone of complacency from the television glowing day and night in your living room, a straightjacket in which to wrap yourself when touching the world is simply.  Uncomfortable.

To seek a comfortable life is to remove your animal self from the world in which you live.  It allows you to ignore the plights of the people around you — if you can’t bear the chill of winter for even a single second, how are you expected to empathize with the people sleeping on the sidewalk in sub-zero temperatures?  Stepping out into the world without wrapping yourself in a blanket of modern comforts is a skill dying in the developed world, pushing us away from the humans responsible for making those modern comforts without the privilege to indulge in them.  A primary goal of comfort removes us from other humans, makes us complacent in the violence that rages through their communities.  In striving for comfort ourselves, we make to deny others the same as though it were fossil fuel — something to extract until the land around it sinks into oblivion.  If I must step out of my cashmere straightjacket to extend a hand to those struggling to make my comfortable life worth it, then I’m leaving that comfort in the dirt.