“Sometimes comfort isn’t something we create. Sometimes it’s something we remember.”
I wanted ribs.
That’s where this story starts. Not philosophy. Not leadership. Not identity. Just ribs.
I went to buy pork ribs to make BBQ ribs for dinner and discovered what many shoppers before me had clearly discovered first: There were none left.
So, being my adaptable self, I bought pork belly instead.
Not a bad compromise, if we’re being honest, and last night I cooked it up. Some with BBQ sauce. Some plain.
Today, while standing in my kitchen thinking about what to do with leftovers, something strange happened.
My brain quietly opened a door I hadn’t walked through for years…
Creamy mashed potato. Sautéed mushrooms. Peas. Broccoli. Pork belly.
My mum used to make this meal quite regularly as pork was cheap in our area.
It was one of my absolute favourites. Not because it was fancy. Not because it belonged in a cookbook. Because it felt like home.
And suddenly I realised something.
Humans are weird. We store emotions inside food. Inside smells. Inside songs. Inside places and inside combinations of things that make absolutely no logical sense until suddenly they make perfect sense.
That meal wasn’t just dinner. It was comfort. It was familiarity. It was safety. It was childhood.
And perhaps more importantly, it reminded me how much of being human is simply searching for anchors.
Because life changes, work changes, relationships change, careers change, health changes, sometimes entire identities change.
When things feel uncertain, we search for things that make us feel known again.
Maybe that’s why certain cafés become “our place” or why certain songs can ruin an entire afternoon, why we watch the same TV series repeatedly, why people return to old hobbies, why teams desperately cling to rituals during periods of organisational change.
People often talk about resistance to change as though it’s a flaw but I’m not convinced that it is. I believe that humans simply look for evidence that they’ll still be okay when everything feels unfamiliar.
Looking back, some of the hardest periods of my life have been periods where I lost too many anchors simultaneously: New job, new expectations, new environments, redundancy, moving, loss.
Identity shifts and the periods that felt survivable weren’t necessarily the periods with less uncertainty, they were the periods where enough familiar things still existed such as a routine. a person, a place, a meal.
Tonight, I’ll probably recreate that meal: creamy mashed potato, mushrooms, peas, broccoli, and pork belly.
And I already know it will taste like more than dinner.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe comfort isn’t weakness. Maybe comfort is infrastructure. Maybe familiar things are the scaffolding we use while we build new versions of ourselves.
And maybe, sometimes, all this reflection starts because somebody bought the last ribs.
