The Comfort Book

by Matt Haig

The only thing we need is to exist. And to hope.

If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here. Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles. It’s about the determination to keep walking forward.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, thought that if we are distressed about something external, “the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

External events are neutral. They only gain positive or negative value the moment they enter our minds. It is ultimately up to us how we greet these things. It’s not always easy, sure, but there is a comfort in knowing it is possible to view any single thing in multiple ways. It also empowers us, because we aren’t at the mercy of the world we can never control, we are at the mercy of a mind we can, potentially, with effort and determination, begin to alter and expand. Our mind might make prisons, but it also gives us keys.

To feel hope you don’t need to be in a great situation. You just need to understand that things will change. Hope is available to all. You don’t need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark. We can have our feet right here where we are, while our minds can hear another octave, right over the rainbow. We can be half inside the present, half inside the future. Half in Kansas, half in Oz.

In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can’t climb a mountain that you pretend isn’t there.

tells. Time showed me that the things depression imagined for me were fallacies, not prophecies.

But it is important to remember the bottom of the valley never has the clearest view.

Because the I is there even without the pain, while the pain is only there as a product of that I. And that I will survive and go on to feel other things.

I realized things weren’t always one thing or another thing. They were sometimes both.

It won’t last. You have felt other things. You will feel other things again. Emotions are like weather. They change and shift. Clouds can seem as still as stone. We look at them and hardly notice a change at all. And yet they always move.

The worst part of any experience is the part where you feel like you can’t take it anymore. So, if you feel like you can’t take it anymore, the chances are you are already at the worst point. The only feelings you have left to experience are better than this one. You are still here. And that is everything.

Words don’t capture, they release.

Writing, then, is a kind of seeing. A way to see your insecurities more clearly. A way to shine a light on doubts and dreams and realize what they are actually about. It can dissolve a whole puddle of worries in the bright light of truth.

Forward momentum is great. But we also need sideways momentum. For instance, I just sat down and ate a pear. I have no idea what the future holds but I am very grateful that I am alive and able to sit on a sofa and eat a pear.

As for ingredients, take two tins of chickpeas, a massive scoop of tahini, garlic (quantity-wise err on the side of incaution), a few glugs of olive oil, the juice of one lemon, some water for texture, and a generous sprinkle each of cumin, cayenne, and salt. Blend the lot. Serve with more cumin and oil. Take some bread, preferably warm and fresh. An olive roll, pita, whatever. Tear, and dunk, and enjoy.

And yet, the thing with hope is that it is persistent. It has the potential to exist even in the most troubled times. Hope isn’t the same thing as happiness. You don’t need to be happy to be hopeful. You need instead to accept the unknowability of the future, and that there are versions of that future that could be better than the present. Hope, in its simplest form, is the acceptance of possibility.

‘When we have really resolved to achieve something,’ my father once said, ‘we succeed. We only have to want it, Juliane.’ ”

After all, movement isn’t progress if we are heading in the wrong direction.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. Helen Keller, We Bereaved

when everything is easy, we have no reason to change. The most painful moments in life expand us. And when the pain leaves, space remains. Space we can fill with life itself.

This is not that remarkable a story. Or rather, it is equally as remarkable as everyone’s origin story. We all come from randomness. We exist out of uncertainty. Out of near impossibility. And yet we exist. So, when you feel the odds are against you it is important to realize that they are never so against you as they were when you didn’t exist. And there you are, we are, existing.

You don’t need to know the future to be hopeful. You just need to embrace the concept of possibility. To accept that the unknowability of the future is the key, and that there are versions of that future that are brighter and fairer than the present. The future is open.

Take the plate of toast to your favorite seat. Sit. Compose yourself. Be fully aware of how wondrous it is to be sentient. To be aware you are not only alive as a human being, but as a human being about to eat some peanut butter on toast. Close your eyes as you take the first bite. Let your worries float by, untethered from their hooks, as you appreciate this living moment of taste and pleasure.

You don’t have to be positive. You don’t have to feel guilty about fear or sadness or anger. You don’t stop the rain by telling it to stop. Sometimes you just have to let it pour, let it soak you to your skin. It never rains forever. And know that, however wet you get, you are not the rain. You are not the bad feelings in your head. You are the person experiencing the storm. The storm may knock you off your feet. But you will stand again. Hold on.

He didn’t need to wait for the vindication of the future to realize he had done the right thing in standing up for people marginalized and punished for being themselves.

Scroll your consciousness for reasons to be grateful to be you. The only fear of missing out that matters is the fear of missing out on yourself.

The binary system of illness and wellness I used to believe in meant you were either one or the other. This was dangerous, because it meant that whenever I began to feel a tiny bit ill again, I would become deeply anxious and depressed that I was back to being properly ill. It would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I would become ill because I believed I was.

And nor is mental health something we can clear up once and for all, but rather something we always have to attend to, like a garden that needs nurturing, for as long as we live.

Do you ever get a kind of gentle sadness that almost feels good? Like a nostalgia for a lost past or a stolen future that is mournful but also reminds you that life is capable of such warm things? And that you were there to witness them? ( I do.)

It seems paradoxical but I was never more scared of death than when I was actively suicidal. And the two things seemed intrinsically related. They were opposites but they were also the same. Fear is compounded by uncertainty and choosing something takes the pain of that uncertainty and turns it into something controllable. It is stupid, really. I wanted to die because I didn’t want to die.

Fears become stronger when we don’t see them.

And it is a part of life. It helps define life. It raises the value of our time here, and the value of the people we spend it with. The silence at the end of the song is as important as the song itself.

as Nietzsche put it: “The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.”

We are where we need to be. We have never lived in the past. There is no past. There is no future. There is just a series of presents. One after the other.

The hardest dream of all to achieve is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams.

To be complete in our incompleteness.

I hope this email finds you in a state of acceptance that this email isn’t exactly important in the cosmic scheme of things.

I hope this email finds you far away from this email.

So, in other words, if we demand the future be free from suffering in order to be happy, we can’t be happy. It is like demanding the sea be entirely still before we sail on it.

You are a human, being.

When things go dark, we can’t see what we have. That doesn’t mean we don’t have those things. Those things remain, right there in front of us. All we need is to light a candle, or ignite some hope, and we can see that what we thought was lost was merely hidden.

Have that metaphorical bag with you, for when it seems happy moments could never exist. Sometimes just to be reminded of happiness makes it more possible.

Ruining the present by worrying about the future is like burning your most treasured possession simply because you might one day lose other possessions that you don’t own yet.

Silence and smiles aren’t the only way to respond to pain. Sometimes it is good to howl.

If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here . . .

“You must never wait in pain,” said the specialist, or words to that effect. It was a message I would think of years later when I was suicidal. “You must see to it straightaway. It doesn’t go away by pretending it isn’t there.”

but the problems start when we are told we can reach perfection with the right bank account or app or personal trainer.

For Plato a tree was always a poor imitation of an ideal tree, whereas for Aristotle a tree always contains its essential tree-ness in its very substance.

The trouble with perfect abstract ideals that we want to reach is that we never get there. They are untouchable rainbows. Far better, I reckon, to find a comfort in the world itself. To try and see trees as essential versions of trees, and ourselves as essential versions of ourselves, and to cultivate the essential spirit of rather than to reach for something that doesn’t and can’t exist and watch it forever slip through our fingers. Work with what you have. Exist in this world. Be the asymmetric square. Be the wonky tree. Be the real you.