What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?
Comfort is having everything you need to live a happy pleasant life. I live in the present. I have been focussing on working with the here and now. And it’s taken a lot of effort to learn to be satisfied with what I have today rather than aspire for and be dissatisfied with it.
Growing up in a slightly bigger-than-average family, all of us were in each other’s business all the time. It would have been lovely to live in a sprawling home with individual rooms for everyone, but I wouldn’t exchange the banter of this in-your-face setup with my siblings in exchange for all the space in the world. But let me clue you in on how crazy it was.
Gravity ensures things move downhill. And I learned this lesson really well growing up. The oldest sibling had moved out of the home and settled in a different location. So when we used to go and visit, my BIL would have us complete chores around the house. It wasn’t just us, it was everyone who stayed with them. All of us had to chip in. They had a maid who came in to clean every day and a cook who came to prepare meals every day as well. But, every Sunday, for the duration of our visit, we would be woken up at 7 am and would have to start with cleaning our room, making the bed, dusting the cobwebs the maid may have missed, and removing and folding clothes that had been hung out to dry in the balcony. We did it all and then some, with a lot of grumbling, whining, and complaining. We used to go and complain to my sibling who stood by, ‘Take your complaints and whines to the person that gave you the chores. Don’t whine to me about someone else’s tasks.’ And with no other option left to us, we completed the tasks. Come Monday, we went back to our lazy ways. Until the cycle repeated a week later. The funniest part of this entire experience was the fact that while we were bullied to clean up after ourselves
Thanks to the crazy Sundays, we slacked off through the week, much like when the cats were away, the mice came out to play. The funny thing was that on Sundays we completed all those chores and tasks that we did not finish during the week. The penalty for not doing it during the week was the early wake-up on Sundays. I hated it then, but I completely understand why we were made to do it. Many years later, on a similar trip to my sibling’s house, when all of us were sitting down for dinner, grown up, maybe not all that wiser, but with kids of our own, we reminisced about the days that we were forced to wake up at 7 am we brought up this topic of Sunday chores and my BIL laughed about it. All he was trying to do was to get to his wardrobe which was at the far end of the room and he had to wade through a series of sprawled arms and legs to get to it. Maybe he was just making an acceptable excuse, maybe it was the truth. Whatever it was, it was hilarious and we all laughed about it.
Many years later a movie was released where the main protagonist was this man with bushy eyebrows, a long sharp nose, and small thin lips. And he treated everyone else in the movie like they were his slaves, Minions to be exact. I don’t know how the character in that movie came to resemble my BIL, but from the bushy eyebrows to the delegation, every last detail of Gru was a caricature of someone all of us grew up with. While they got the character of Gru to perfectly match my BIL, we did not match the minions. But, gravity, things rolling downhill the movie was everything we experienced all those years ago.
The funniest part of that combined family trip was the realization that we were doing all of those things we had complained about right down to waking the kids up at ungodly hours on a Sunday morning. Gravity was the only explanation I could come up with for that behavior because, there we were, all grown up and adults. All of us, woke our little kids at 7 am on a Sunday, so we could finish our respective chores and relax for the rest of the day. And that trend continues to this day. I wake up the kids early over the vacations to help complete chores around the house. I don’t have a maid and I don’t have a cook coming in on Sundays, and if we finish the chores, then we get to order in, but, chores always topped the list. So, when you ask me, what strategies I use to increase comfort in my daily life, I use minions. After all, I learned the trick from the best. My dear Gru, thank you for teaching us the importance of gravity. After all, shit rolls downhill!
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