Extract: The Comfort Book by Matt Haig

This entry was posted on 29 July 2021.

The Comfort Book  is a collection of consolations learned in hard times and suggestions for making the bad days better. Drawing on maxims, memoir and the inspirational lives of others, these meditations celebrate the everchanging wonder of living. This is for when we need the wisdom of a friend or a reminder we can always nurture inner strength and hope, even in our busy world.

 

INTRODUCTION

I SOMETIMES WRITE THINGS DOWN TO COMFORT MYSELF. Stuff learned in the bad times. Thoughts. Meditations. Lists. Examples. Things I want to remind myself of. Or things I have learned from other people or other lives.

It is a strange paradox, that many of the clearest, most comforting life lessons are learnt while we are at our lowest. But then we never think about food more than when we are hungry and we never think about life rafts more than when we are thrown overboard.

So, these are some of my life rafts. The thoughts that have kept me afloat. I hope some of them might carry you to dry land too.

 

A NOTE ON STRUCTURE

THIS BOOK IS AS MESSY AS LIFE.

It has a lot of short chapters and some longer ones. It contains lists and aphorisms and quotes and case studies and lists and even the occasional recipe. It is influenced by experience but has moments of inspiration taken from anything ranging from quantum physics to philosophy, from movies I like to ancient religions to Instagram.

You can read it how you want. You can start at the beginning and end at the end, or you can start at the end and end at the beginning, or you can just dip into it.

You can crease the pages. You can tear out the pages. You can lend it to a friend (though maybe not if you’ve torn out the pages). You can place it beside your bed or keep it next to the toilet. You can throw it out of the window. There are no rules.

There is a kind of accidental theme, though. The theme is connection. We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.

When times are hard, we need a deep kind of comfort. Something elemental. A solid support. A rock to hold on to.

The kind we already have inside us. But which we some­times need a bit of help to see.

 

PART ONE

 

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

 

********************

 

BABY

 

IMAGINE YOURSELF AS A BABY. You would look at that baby and think they lacked nothing. That baby came complete. Their value was innate from their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of a human life. And that value stays with us, even as it becomes easier to forget it. We stay precisely as alive and precisely as human as we were the day we were born. The only thing we need is to exist. And to hope.

 

********************

 

YOU ARE THE GOAL

 

YOU DON’T HAVE TO CONTINUALLY IMPROVE YOURSELF TO LOVE YOURSELF. Love is not something you only deserve if you reach a goal. The world is a world of pressure but don’t let it squeeze your self-compassion. You were born worthy of love and you remain worthy of love. Be kind to yourself.

 

********************

 

NOTHING IS STRONGER than a small hope that doesn’t give up.

 

********************

 

A THING MY DAD SAID ONCE WHEN WE WERE LOST IN A FOREST

 

ONCE UPON A TIME, MY FATHER AND I GOT LOST IN A FOREST IN FRANCE. I must have been about twelve or thirteen. Anyway, it was before the era when most people owned a mobile phone. We were on holiday, the rural, landlocked, basic kind of middle-class holiday I didn’t really understand. It was in the Loire Valley, and we had gone for a run. About half an hour in, my dad realised the truth. ‘Oh, it seems that we’re lost.’ We walked round and round in circles, trying to find the path, but with no luck. My dad asked two men – poachers – for directions and they sent us the wrong way. I could tell my dad was starting to panic, even as he was trying to hide it from me. We had been in the forest for hours now and both knew my mum would be in a state of absolute terror. At school, I had just been told the Bible story of the Israelites who had died in the wilderness and I found it easy to imagine that would be our fate too. ‘If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here,’ my dad said.

 

And he was right. Eventually we heard the sound of cars and reached a main road. We were eleven miles from the village where we had started off, but at least we had sign­posts now. We were clear of the trees. And I often think of that strategy, when I am totally lost – literally or metaphor­ically. I thought of it when I was in the middle of a breakdown. When I was living in a panic attack punctuated only by depression, when my heart pounded rapidly with fear, when I hardly knew who I was and didn’t know how I could carry on living. 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.

 

********************

 

IT’S OKAY

 

IT’S OKAY TO BE BROKEN.

It’s okay to wear the scars of experience.

It’s okay to be a mess.

It’s okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.

It’s okay to be sentimental and whimsical and cry bittersweet tears at songs and movies you aren’t supposed to love.

It’s okay to like what you like.

It’s okay to like things for literally no other reason than because you like them and not because they are cool or clever or popular.

It’s okay to let people find you. You don’t have to spread yourself so thin you become invisible. You don’t have to always be the person reaching out. You can sometimes allow yourself to be reached. As the great writer Anne Lamott puts it: ‘Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island for boats to save; they just stand there shining.’

It’s okay not to make the most of every chunk of time.

It’s okay to be who you are.

It’s okay.

 

********************

 

POWER

 

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’.

I love this, but also know from experience that finding that power can be near impossible at times. We can’t just click our fingers and be rid of, say, grief, or the stress of work, or health worries. When we are lost in the forest, our fear might not be directly caused by the forest, or our being lost in said forest, but while we are actively lost in the forest it very much feels like the source of our fear is being lost in the forest.

But it is helpful to remember that our perspective is our world. And our external circumstances don’t need to change in order for our perspective to change. And the forests we find ourselves in are metaphorical, and sometimes we are unable to escape them, but with a change of perspective we can live among the trees.

 

Extracted from The Comfort Book, out now.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 
 
 
 
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
 

YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY

Moving through uncertainty with determination and confidence

Facebook  Twitter