Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig

The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.

I am petrified of where my mind can go, because I know where it has already been.

As Montaigne put it, “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”

To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvelous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.

Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.

The future isn’t real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.

But when I was ill—when I was in the thick of it—my life depended on abandoning that pessimistic side of myself. Cynicism was a luxury for the nonsuicidal. I had to find hope. The thing with feathers. My life depended on it.

“For after all,” wrote the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.”