The Comfort Book - Matt Haig Page 0,19

age of thirteen. Up until then my parents had been paying for me to attend weekly piano lessons with a piano teacher, Mrs. Peters. But then I became the adolescent who didn’t want to tell his friends he couldn’t see them on Friday evening because he was having piano lessons. Other interests took over my young mind, and learning Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and Mozart’s “Gavotte” seemed suddenly an irrelevant chore.

Many times over the years I have regretted that decision, wondering what it would have been like if I had kept going. And yet, for all that wondering, I never actively did anything about it until this year, at the age of forty-five, when I began to relearn the piano with my kids during lockdown. Of course, it is humiliating trying to learn anything side-by-side with an eleven- and twelve-year-old. It is like trying to learn to swim beside a sailfish. But it was great to make progress, to actually play, and to realize that there is no cut-off age for development.

Joy Harjo is not the only musical late starter, of course. Leonard Cohen famously didn’t begin his musical career until deep in his thirties. Though gifted musically from a young age, Verdi wrote most of his best stuff after the age of fifty, including his opera of Otello that he finished aged seventy-three.

I will never be as musically competent as Verdi, or Joy Harjo, or even, as it turns out, a fast-learning twelve-year-old, but I have access to the ability to play music, and enjoy playing music, and that is enough. The joy of music is in the music. The playing of it. The listening to it. And it is a joy with a wide-open door, welcoming all.

That’s all we can do, right? Keep as many doors open as possible. Keep embracing the whole of ourselves. Keep failing. As Harjo herself says, “There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.”

Protection

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.

Quantum freedom

According to quantum physics, the laws of the universe are probabilistic. This means that even among the smallest particles, nothing is entirely predictable. There is always uncertainty and things that can’t be entirely predicted and measured. Determinism fails in the face of quantum reality. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who came up with the uncertainty principle—or rather, the Uncertainty Principle—discovered that even if every single initial condition is known, it is still impossible to predict with any fixed certainty the behavior of waves and particles. Likewise, chaos theory explains how even things on a bigger scale, like weather, are not entirely predictable and can’t ever be. (How many times have we been surprised by a day of sunshine when we were told to expect showers?) Similarly, neuroscientists have shown us that the very structure of our brain, and the nerve cells within it, also acts with elements of randomness.

In other words, a key defining feature of the universe, of nature, of our environment, of us, is uncertainty. There is always a space for chance. As something begins to change or move, it changes with a degree of the unknown, whether it is light through a slit in a barrier or a hurricane or a brain cell. The universe is, essentially, an ever-evolving possibility. While fear might want us to imagine the worst is certain, the future—like everything else—remains uncertain, unpredictable, open, free. And even the very smallest event in the maze that is our lives can result in the most unexpected outcome.

Other people are other people

Let’s state the obvious, because the obvious is easy to take for granted and forget. You are not other people. You are you. You have no control over other people. You have no absolute control over what they think of the world or of politics or of you. You have no control over what harm they may have done. Even if the harm they have done is to you. Yes, of course we can often learn from each other, and sometimes people learn from you. And that’s great, even if it is rarer than we like to admit. As Ayishat Akanbi put it, “If you’ve decided your healing is dependent on other people acknowledging their faults