“My mother is a great source of advice and wisdom and consolation for me.”

-Katherine Heigl

Comfort is a very powerful force in the lives of human beings. It can make us smile, cry, and even stand out as being weird. I believe that comfort becomes an essential part of life when we are in the face of danger, tragedy. Fear creates in us a need for comfort, a feeling of warmth, love, and empathy, but in order to find comfort in our everyday lives, we must first understand what comfort is. Comfort is warmth, kindness, love, friendship, and understanding; all things that we need to have a happy and successful life.

Comfort is warmth; the feeling of a nice warm fire on a cold winter night. We need warmth to survive, both physically, and emotionally. We all experience this in our daily lives, but warmth is more than just heat. It is the very feeling that keeps us happy. It is a blanket. It is a hug. It is a shoulder to cry on. The easiest way to get warmth is through the people most important to us - our family and friends. They are the ones who know the most about us, sometimes even more than we know about ourselves. Elie was able to find his warmth in his dad. Even though they were never best friends, Elie was able to lean on his father and allow his father to lean on him. Our lives are the same now. We all have a few specific people that we turn to most frequently. All of us have problems, and tragedies to deal with. Some of them may be similar to Elie’s, but others are simple. Mine was my moms brain surgery. I was vulnerable, unable to cope on my own. I needed warmth, comfort, care. My uncle, my bestfriend, was the one who gave that to me. Everyone can find comfort, and warmth, in knowing that someone cares.

Kindness is also essential to the feeling of comfort. People that are rude can not be a comfort. They have no idea how to be kind or compassionate. They don’t understand what it means to care. “We grow up believing no one would ever fall in love with us, that we’d be lonely forever, that we’d never meet someone to make us feel like the sun was something they built for us in their tool shed.” (To This Day, stanza 12). This is because of a lack of kindness, and understanding. When no one is kind, we grow up believing that we are alone, without a friend, without warmth, without kindness. That is not a comfort.

Another vital part of comfort is love. If we truly want to comfort one another, we need to be loving. One of the biggest obstacles to love is indifference. Because of indifference, Elie said that the Jews “felt abandoned, forgotten.”(The Perils of Indifference, p 13). A feeling of abandonment is not a comfort. We need to feel loved. The Lumineers said that "the opposite of love's indifference." Indifference, therefore is nothing but an enemy to comfort. Without love, we have no way to truly appreciate one another.There is no way to comfort someone we don't love. "Indifference is... a punishment."(The Perils of Indifference, p.11)

Friends are also very important to finding comfort. You’re best friends truly understand you. They know about all your problems, and understand you. Your best friend is the one person you want to spend the most time with. The best friend I’ve ever had is my uncle, John. He is one of the few people who always knows what to say. John is one of the only people I can confide in, completely. He is the only one that I can text, at any hour, and know that I will get a reply. When I have a hard day, he is there in heartbeat, holding me as I cry into his shoulder. He sincerely cares about me, since I’ve known him all my life. John understands what I’ve gone through in my life, and is always there. Many people have friends like this. For some, it is their significant other, others, their best friend, still others have this kind of relationship with their family. In one of his songs, Morrissey brought out that friends will fall, defending you. It is a comfort to have friends.

Comfort is a vital part of human existence. Without it, there is no way of living a life of happiness. If I didn’t have comfort when my mom had surgery, I wouldn’t have been able to cope. In the face of tragedy, we need someone to look up to, a shoulder to cry on. Without a comfort, our emotions tend to get bottled up inside, ready to explode at any small pinprick. We have to have someone or something to help us release our emotions, fears. We also need to rememver that they are always there.It is more than just knowing that you can make it through. It is having someone who can live through it with you. It is having someone who you understand, and who understands you.