The relative comfort

It has been a long time, a couple of years to be precise. The reminder on FB of a post from last year brought the memory back.

It was late in the evening and I was waiting at a bus stand. If my memory serves me right, It was raining as well. After a long wait, I decided to have a seat. The seating bench was a new one at the bus stand and after sitting for some time, I felt that the seat could be a couple of inches wider for me to sit comfortably. I am not one of the bigger guys around, so was pretty sure that a larger portion of the population would find it uncomfortable to sit on this new seating in the bus stand. The metal frame of the seat didn’t do any good to the seating comfort.

It was at that moment, that I see a person come towards the place I was seated. Seems to be homeless, the small package he carried and his overall condition indicated the same. He comes over, finds an empty space on the seat a bit away from me. He dusts off the space with a cloth he has, places the small package on the seat proceeds to lie down on the seating bench with the package doubling up as a pillow. Within no time, I could see that he fell into a deep sleep and here I am still struggling to seat myself comfortably.

The concept of relative comfort dawned upon me at that moment. Many a time, our comfort zones are what we defined them to be and there are many who find it a luxury about something that we struggle to come to terms with.

While I am not much of a taker for a life-changing single incident, such instances in life do offer some perspective. Over the past couple of years, I did go back to this incident in my life when faced with a situation of choice and was able to make a decision by coming out of self-defined comfort zones, because comfort is what one makes of it.

p.c: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Homeless_person_in_Brisbane_in_2017.jpg