Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.