The Comfort Book - Matt Haig Page 0,18

that buck the trend—because these are the parts that will keep us new and capable of surprise. They will stop us becoming a cover version of ourselves. They will help us become new songs.

Outside

Yes, sure, it is comfortable to be on the inside. Sheltered, protected. But there is a comfort to the outside too. Because outside is freedom. Outside you can keep moving until you find a place of your own. Or you can decide that outside is your place. And stay there.

Realization

I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn’t fit in was because I didn’t want to.

The way out of your mind is via the world

By the age of thirty-two, Ludwig van Beethoven’s deafness was accelerating fast. He wrote to his brothers to convey his despair that people judged him as “malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic” when really he was just in a state of inner turmoil due to his advancing condition. He wrote that he felt like a “hopeless case” because he hadn’t been writing much music, which is like Shakespeare calling himself a bit of a slacker for taking a while to write Hamlet.

Beethoven recalled times when he was in the countryside and a shepherd was singing or someone was playing a flute and he hadn’t been able to hear a thing. Such instances had brought him to despair and he “would have put an end to my life—only Art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce . . .”

Only Art it was that withheld me.

And so he stayed alive. Even as his deafness increased—the ultimate torture for the ultimate musician—he continued to create. Indeed, some of his greatest works, such as his brilliantly brooding and atmospheric Piano Sonata No. 14—commonly known as the “Moonlight Sonata”—were created when he was entirely deaf.

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What a tragic thought that the man who created some of the most well-known music in the world never heard a lot of it. But he had a passion. And the history of the arts is filled with sensitive-minded people who have been consoled and given purpose by the art they create, from Emily Dickinson to Georgia O’Keeffe.

We don’t need to write piano sonatas, but what we do need is to be immersed in our passions. It can be anything outside of ourselves. A few years ago, I kid you not, I helped pull myself out of a moderate anxiety patch by getting deeply into the first four seasons of Game of Thrones.

Curiosity and passion are the enemies of anxiety. Even when I fall deeply into anxiety, if I get curious enough about something outside of me it can help pull me out. Music, art, film, nature, conversation, words.

Find a passion as large as your fear.

The way out of your mind is via the world.

Joy Harjo and the one whole voice

“Everyone comes into the world with a job to do,” wrote Joy Harjo. “I don’t mean working for a company, a corporation—we were all given gifts to share, even the animals, even the plants, minerals, clouds . . . All beings.”

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the first Indigenous American to become the United States poet laureate. Her poems are beautiful, and draw on her heritage and the depths of the human subconscious. She is an activist, but her activism isn’t confined to one area. She has spoken about the rights of Indigenous Americans, feminism and climate change, and feels these are all interconnected. Indeed, that is a theme of her work. The holistic nature of things. “To pray you open your whole self / To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon / To one whole voice that is you.”

Harjo embodies this in other ways too. When she performs she fuses prose and poetry and music as if they are all the same thing. She wrote a piece called “Ahhhh Saxophone” and with that instrument, she says, “all that love we humans carry makes a sweet deep sound and we fly a little.”

She has won awards for her music as well as her poetry. The interesting thing is that she was in her forties before she learned to play the saxophone. Well, it’s interesting—and comforting—to me because it tells me it is really never too late to begin something valuable.

I abandoned the piano at the