The Comfort Book - Matt Haig Page 0,1

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.

Nothing either good or bad

When Hamlet tells his old university buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he doesn’t mean this in a positive way. Shakespeare’s prince is in a foul and depressed mood, but with reason. He is talking about Denmark, and indeed the whole world, being a prison. For him, Denmark really is a physical and psychological prison. But he is also aware that perspective plays a part in this. And that the world and Denmark aren’t intrinsically bad. They are bad from his perspective. They are bad because he thinks they are.

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.

Change is real

We turn keys all the time. Or rather: time turns keys all the time. Because time means change.

And change is the nature of life. The reason to hope.

Neuroplasticity is the way our brains change their structure according to the things we experience. None of us are the same people we were ten years ago. When we feel or experience terrible things, it is useful to remember that nothing lasts. Perspective shifts. We become different versions of ourselves. The hardest question I have ever been asked is: “How do I stay alive for other people if I have no one?” The answer is that you stay alive for other versions of you. For the people you will meet, yes, sure, but also the people you will be.

To be is to let go

Self-forgiveness makes the world better. You don’t become a good person by believing you are a bad one.

Somewhere

Hope is a beautiful thing to find in art or stories or music. It is often a surprise moment, like in The Shawshank Redemption when the poster of Raquel Welch is pulled off the wall in Andy’s prison cell. Or in The Sound of Music when Captain von Trapp switches from repressed widower to singing father in the space of a single scene.

It is often subtle, but you know it when you feel it. Like when “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” effortlessly goes up a whole octave within the word “somewhere,” jumping clean over seven natural keys—an actual musical rainbow—before landing on the eighth. Hope always involves a soaring and a reaching. Hope flies. The thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson said.

People often imagine it is hard to feel hopeful when times are tough, yet I tend to think the opposite. Or at least, hope is the thing we most want to cling on to in periods of despair or worry. I think that it’s no coincidence that “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” one of the most bittersweet yet hopeful songs in the world, a song that has topped polls as the greatest song of the twentieth century, was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg for The Wizard of Oz in one of the bleakest years in human history: 1939. Harold wrote the music, while Yip penned the words. Harold and Yip themselves were no strangers to suffering. Yip had seen the horrors of the First World War and was left bankrupt following the crash of 1929. As for Harold, who would become known for his hopeful octave-leaping, he was born with a twin brother who sadly died in infancy. Aged sixteen, Harold