The Comfort Book - Matt Haig Page 0,27

actually are, when we are willing to move out of safe and known patterns toward—to be Keatsian about it—the unknowing beauty of life.

As Wilfred Bion put it, “Beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable.”

We don’t have to work everything out. We can just witness the beauty.

Why break when you can bend?

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.

But you can drop the disguise. You can feel what you feel. You can stretch out inside yourself.

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

You can, in fact, be you.

We have more in common than we think

It is easy to hate everyone these days. It’s easy to go on the internet or switch on the news and feel despair. It’s easy to find reasons to be angry. We have social media apps whose very business model depends on our ongoing capacity for fury and frustration.

It’s easy to be surrounded so entirely by a single view that almost anyone without that view becomes alien.

But.

We can look at the world through more than one lens. If we look at people through the lens of emotion, at the feelings that drive opinions, rather than the opinions themselves, it’s easy to see the things we share. The hopes, the fears, the loves, the insecurities, the longings, the doubts, the dreams.

Other people can be wrong, and we can be wrong, and that is another thing we have in common.

The capacity for fucking up. And for forgiving.

Forgiveness

Forgiving other people is great practice for forgiving yourself when the time comes.

A note on introversion

Introversion is not something you fix via extroversion. You fix it by seeing it as something not to be fixed. Let introversion exist. Allow journeys inward as well as outward.

Resting is doing

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. As I grow older, I think that resting might actually be the main point of life. To sit down passively, inside or outside, and merely absorb things—the tick of a clock, a cloud passing by, the distant hum of traffic, a bird singing—can feel like an end in itself. It can actually feel and be more meaningful than a lot of the stuff we are conditioned to see as productive. Just as we need pauses between notes for music to sound good, and just as we need punctuation in a sentence for it to be coherent, we should see rest and reflection and passivity—and even sitting on the sofa—as an intrinsic and essential part of life that is needed for the whole to make sense.

Mystery

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.

The comfort of uncertainty

Uncertainty feeds our anxiety. Uncertainty and anxiety are intrinsically linked. The more anxious we are, the harder we will find tolerating uncertainty. We might write lists, avoid delegating. We might seek constant reassurance. We might double check that we locked the door, or repeatedly want to call someone to check they are okay. We might find ourselves clasping control and unwilling to trust others. We might want to retreat from an anxious world and stay indoors and procrastinate. We might want to escape it altogether by losing ourselves in a world of distraction. We might fill every second of our day with busy activities, with work, with pleasure, with our other addictions.

Of course, none of these things address the root problem. Uncertainty still remains. The only way, ultimately, to deal with uncertainty is to accept uncertainty. Because we can’t escape it. However we choose to timetable our days and our calendars, uncertainty still remains. This is a stubbornly uncertain world, and we have to deal