The Comfort Book

by Matt Haig

We need kindness. We need a way to see the difference between who people are and what they sometimes do. And that includes us.

Our very existence is a remarkable testimony to human survival. When we think of the likelihood that, after 150,000 generations, we would end up here, alive, right now, as us, we are contemplating an improbability so vast it is almost an impossibility.

We are all inside a dream that is real. We are the fires conjured from nothing. We exist out of near impossibility. And yet we exist.

“To pray you open your whole self / To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon / To one whole voice that is you.”

That’s all we can do, right? Keep as many doors open as possible. Keep embracing the whole of ourselves.

Once upon a time I felt pressure not to let people down. I stayed doing work I hated. Went to parties I didn’t really want to be at. Saw people I found agonizingly hard to converse with. Faked every smile. And then my mind exploded. After which I realized it is better to let people down than to blow yourself up.

are so blessed with an abundance of wonder on this planet, and in this universe, that we are numb to it. And it is often only in times of intense crisis that such things become apparent.

“Dwell on the beauty of life,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations two millennia ago, “watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”

“The universe is change,” wrote Marcus Aurelius. “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”

The sky doesn’t start above us. There is no starting point for sky. We live in the sky.

“Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.”

As Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön put it, “the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.” Healing means to live in the raw.

You are okay. You may feel like you are in a nightmare. Your mind might be beating you up. You may think you aren’t going to make it. But remember a time you felt bad before. And think of something good that happened since, in the interim. That specific goodness may or may not happen again, but some goodness will. Just wait.

Sometimes you can just be and feel things and get through and eat chips and survive, and that is more than enough.

Toy Story 2. Because it is the greatest and most emotional and consoling Pixar movie, for Jessie’s story alone. Stand by Me. Because despite being a film about a search for a dead body, it is a celebration of youth and friendship and life.

You don’t have to cope with everything. You don’t have to handle everything. You don’t have to keep a lid on every-thing to get through a day.

You can’t turn tides. You can’t defy gravity. You can’t go against the grain without getting splinters.

You can cry. You can feel. You can show what you are.

You don’t need to be busy. You don’t need to justify your existence in terms of productivity. Rest is an essential part of survival. An essential part of us. An essential part of being the animals we are. When a dog lies in the sun I imagine it does it without guilt, because as far as I can tell dogs seem more in tune with their own needs.

Think of the works of art that stand the test of time, from the Mona Lisa to Middlemarch. There is always something unsolvable about them. Something critics can debate passionately centuries later with no final certainty. Maybe the art of living is like that too. Maybe the purpose is the mystery, not beyond it. Maybe we aren’t meant to know everything about our lives. And maybe that’s perfectly okay.

Because at some point, in any life, something bad will happen, and it is the inherent uncertainty of what that bad thing will ultimately mean to you, what it will lead to, and what it will reveal, that enables us to have a more enduring and resilient kind of hope. A hope that doesn’t wish for bad things not to happen—because they sometimes do—but rather one that enables us to see that bad things are never the whole story. They are as filled with uncertain outcomes as everything else.

we need to find comfort in uncertainty. And it is there. Because while things are uncertain, they are never closed. We can exist in hope, in the infinite, in the unanswered and open question of life itself.

Each of us has the power to enter a new world. All we have to do is change our mind.

There are only open endings in life. And this isn’t a curse. This is a good thing. As the Buddhist thinker Pema Chödrön puts it, “we suffer from resolution.” I find that idea so liberating. To admit that closure is unreachable in a universe where everything is open.

It is no coincidence that the things that comfort me when I am super-frazzled, the things that calm and soothe me, tend to be things that reconnect me to my natural self. So, for instance, going to bed shortly after it gets dark rather than staying up till one a.m. to watch eleven episodes of a TV show one after the other. Or walking in nature with our dog. Or cooking real food with real ingredients. Or being with loved ones. Or switching from the sofa to physical activity. Or planting some herbs. Or swimming in the sea. Or staring at the sky. Or running in the fresh air rather than on the treadmill.

To be free was to be in the thick of all the buzz and distraction life could offer.

I felt like a human mirage. Empty on the inside. So rather than face the void, I tried to escape it.

The only problem is that you can’t run away from yourself. Wherever you go, you’re always there.

My desperate desire to avoid pain and discomfort led to me feeling the worst pain and discomfort of my life. It trapped me inside it.

I didn’t need to go out and grab life. I was life.

If you truly feel part of a bigger picture, if you can see yourself in other people and nature, if this you becomes something bigger than the individual you, then you never truly depart the world when you die. You exist as long as life exists. Because the life you feel inside you is part of the same life force that exists in every living thing.

It’s easy to want to run away from bad feelings. When we feel sadness or fear we greet them as problems to be instantly solved or dismissed.

In Tibetan the word re-dok is a portmanteau of the words rewa (hope) and dokpa (fear), acknowledging they coexist and both stem from essentially the same thing—uncertainty.

Remember There will be other days. And other feelings.

Everything in front of us is defined by possibility. We are never inside the future. We are outside the door. We have our hand on the handle. We are turning the handle.

And even if we end up somewhere we don’t want to be, we can be thankful for the knowledge that another door exists. And another beautiful handle, waiting to be turned.

May I be safe and live happily . . . May she be safe and live happily . . . May they be safe and live happily . . . May all living beings be safe and live happily.

We become what we always were. Life itself.

Nothing truly ends. It changes. Change is eternal. In being change, you too are eternal. You are here. In this moving moment. And in being here, you are also forever.