Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots.

We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.

At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.

Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing.

I wouldn’t drink that if you and I were the last people on the planet and you promised me it was poison.

She didn’t have any real plan, just a consequence.

“Is this what your personality is like? Are you happy with it?”

Anna-Lena sometimes used to think that everyone gets a few moments that show who they really are, tiny instances that reveal their entire soul, and Roger’s were this knocking. Because sometimes, so fleetingly that no one but Anna-Lena would even notice it, he would stand motionless immediately after a knock, looking at the wall in anticipation. The way a child might. As if he were hoping that one day someone would knock back. Those were Anna-Lena’s favorite Roger moments.

My daughter says the world is already overpopulated, and she’s worried about climate change. I don’t know why ordinary anxieties aren’t enough. Does anyone really need something new to worry about?”

“I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”

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.