I didn’t realize the media had covered the heat spell so much. I only knew people kept asking me about sleeping without air conditioning the past few days.

Now that I looked up the news from a couple days ago, I see they were going nuts about a heat dome.

All I know is that for the past three nights, I woke up sweating and had trouble falling asleep, even setting up a separate mattress closer to the window. There wasn’t much breeze.

Regular readers know I don’t use air conditioning. Was I suffering? While, I won’t deny discomfort, in my heart I wasn’t thinking about global warming, the environment, or anything abstract like that. I was thinking of the people I would hurt if I turned on the apartment’s air conditioning, not that I could, since I closed my account with Con Ed.

They may be distant, but they are neighbors and I find my life benefits from loving my neighbor as myself. I’d rather connect with them and experience discomfort than try vainly to suppress my connection to them so I could feel more comfort.

Some might say, “but isn’t it hard?”

Am I suffering?

Let me introduce you to a woman I recently learned of, Corrie ten Boom, mentioned in The Choice, by Dr. Edith Eger. I watched one documentary on her and am partway through another. According to Wikipedia, during WWII in Holland ten Boom “worked with her father, Casper ten Boom, her sister Betsie ten Boom and other family members to help many Jewish people escape from the Nazis during the Holocaust in World War II by hiding them in her home.”

This family, which faced relatively low risk from the Nazis themselves, opened up part of their home to house Jews from the Nazis. They risked their lives, and lost them. I woke up sweating three nights in a row in weather humans have faced for hundreds of thousands of years.

They sheltered Jews from Nazis and people ask me if sleeping in heat is hard.

Do they know what love is?

• ← Why I love volunteering
• More love for the recent heat wave now that it’s passed →