What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?
I don’t, but I have a lot of strategies for being more content in the face of various situations and environments — including uncomfortable ones. These include the yogic practice of dispassionate witnessing, minimalism, travel (and specifically minimalist travel to places – the less familiar the better,) and intense physical activity.
I think comfort as a major objective in life is overrated, and virtually insures a discontented life. A life in which one can be content, whatever may come along, is a happy life.
That’s a tough one, but I have to go with a trip to the Peruvian Andes about twelve-ish years ago. As a person from Northwest Indiana (where anthills appear on topographic maps,) it was my first time in the Very High Altitude range. We hiked through the Salkantay Pass (15,000+ft / 4500+m) on the second day of a trek with me vomiting (water, as my stomach was long devoid of other contents) every couple switch-backs. I’m told I was literally green, but can’t confirm for lack of mirrors. But I trudged through, one glacial step at a time.
At the end of our trip, we were in Arequipa and needed to get back to Cuzco for our flight out. After buying bus tickets, we discovered that the road from Arequipa to Cuzco would be shut down by a transportation strike, and that everyone was honoring the strike as they sometimes turned violent. After a day of frustration, we surrendered to the situation, traded in our Arequipa-Cuzco tickets for Arequipa-Lima tickets, and we got into Lima (where we had a layover) early enough to arrange to join the flight there.
The reason this stands out as such a wonderful trip (besides all the beautiful sights: Titicaca, Machu Picchu, the Andes, all the Incan ruins and old Spanish churches; not to mention the delicious food) is the powerful life lessons it taught me. First, I’ve never felt closer to death than crossing through Salkantay Pass, and yet one step at a time got me through. Second, I learned not to butt heads with changing circumstance, but rather flow over, around, or under. Lastly, trips where things go wrong produce the dividend of great stories. Nobody cares about your trip to Paris where everything went smoothly, but they can’t get enough about the trip to Zaire where you got Malaria and were caught up in an insurrection or the cruise where passengers started turning to zombies.
I have a daily practice of FEELING gratitude for this awesome life and all that contributes to said awesomeness. I don’t place much emphasis on EXPRESSING emotion beyond the usual social protocols and niceties. Quite frankly, I think expression of gratitude is overrated. It binds the process up with ego and desire for reciprocity, and the next thing you know you’ve lost all touch with the experience of gratitude and the powerful influence it has on fostering a positive outlook.
Furthermore, when one emphasizes expression, one tends to develop a blind-spot, thinking that the only entities worthy of consideration of gratefulness are other intelligent beings (or constructs attributed intelligence — e.g. gods.) I begin (though do not end) my practice of gratitude with my body (/ mind) and its systems. I’ve been told many people have trouble fostering gratitude when they focus on their body, but I don’t think one really understands gratitude if one can’t feel deep gratitude for one’s body and mind (literal warts and all.) For the body is the means by which one experiences everything, and one can only be unconditionally grateful for it. [For those who have trouble being grateful for body and mind, I’d recommend the book, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by Jean-Dominique Bauby. It’s a short read because it was dictated using eye-blinks by a man who developed “Locked-in Syndrome,” a condition that left its author only with conscious control of an eyelid.]
The only optional activities I do every day are: reading, writing poetry, overhead hanging, and handstanding.
[Obviously, there are non-optional transport, hygienic, homeostatic, and metabolic maintenance activities: e.g. the breathing, peeing, pooping, walking, eating, toothbrushing, washing, etc.]
T-shirt and sweatpants. Of course, I’d never be able to move back to temperate climes and would have to stay in the tropics. And if it was really one outfit (vs. many copies of the same outfit) I would probably end up going nude after a year-and-a-half or so when said outfit disintegrated into its component threads. So, I’d then have to join a religion, because holy men seem to be the only ones allowed to go buck naked out in the streets without consequence. This is starting to entail more than superficial change.
(Of course, I now notice that the prompt doesn’t say one would exclusively wear this one outfit. But then I think the question becomes meaningless because I think most people — except perhaps a few “fashion influencers” and “celebrities” (quote marks are intentional) — do wear a given outfit over and over [I know I do.])
Point is: it has to be comfortable, not restrict my range of motion, not result in me being a sweaty mess all the time, and allow me to blend.
1.) Move my body often and with vigor. 2.) Eat my veggies. 3.) Rest as though it’s an essential part of the process of living (i.e. not as though it’s goofing off between “doing stuff.”) 4.) Drop anything without value, making personal development as much a process of stripping away as it is of adding to.
My days are out of joint and shuffled up,
and memories are pictures cast upon
the floor, and rummaged through 'til chaos reigns,
and I pick random recollections out
of all the events ever to transpire.
They seem no more my life than another's:
a glance, a glimpse, a blank firing of mind,
a wicked hope that truth will come to me.
But all I see are monochrome mindscapes
that could've been wrenched out of another mind,
or made from AI's collage artistry
to serve some distant master's deep wish to
learn what hot-injected time does to a soul,
and if shuffled scene stacks can make one whole?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 