The Comfort Book

(Matt Haig, 2021)

It is a strange paradox, that many of the clearest, most comforting life lessons are learned while we are at our lowest.

If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here.

Power

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.

Our external circumstances don’t need to change in order for our perspective to change.

Nothing either good or bad

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

External events are neutral. They only gain positive or negative value the moment they enter our minds.

Change is real

Time means change.

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

Mountain

In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it.

Valley

Depression lies. And while the feelings themselves were real, the things they led me to believe were resolutely not.

There is something bigger than depression, and that thing is time. Time disproves the lies depression tells. Time showed me that the things depression
imagined for me were fallacies, not prophecies.

Sum

Things weren’t always one thing or another thing. They were sometimes both.

For when you reach rock bottom

Stay for the person you will become.

Words

We are always grasping after a meaning we can never quite reach.

Words are never quite the thing they describe, but that is also their use. They can help externalize internal things. The moment we try and turn a thought into words we place it into a shared world.

Words don’t capture, they release.

The power of why

Writing, then, is a kind of seeing. A way to see your insecurities more clearly. A way to shine a light on doubts and dreams and realize what they are actually about. It can dissolve a whole puddle of worries in the bright light of truth.

The gaps of life

When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value. It rises not only in visibility but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.

Foundation

In order to find the people who like you, it is first necessary to be you.

There is always a path through the forest

The thing with hope is that it is persistent. It has the potential to exist even in the most troubled times.

Hope, in its simplest form, is the acceptance of possibility.

Pizza

The best of life exists beyond the things we are encouraged to crave.

Life is
“understood backward; but it must be lived forward”
(Søren Kierkegaard)

No

No is a good word. It keeps you sane. In an age of overload, no is really yes. It is yes to having the space you need to live.

Happiness

Happiness occurs when you forget who you’re expected to be. And what you’re expected to do. Happiness is an accident of self-acceptance.

Growth

We grow through hard times. Growth is change. And when everything is easy, we have no reason to change. The most painful moments in life expand us. And when the pain leaves, space remains. Space we can fill with life itself.

River

The flow of life is about accepting things as part of something bigger.

Tips for how to make a bad day better

Allow bad thoughts, because that way they pass through quicker.

Jaws and Nietzsche and death and life

Fears become stronger when we don’t see them.

Burn

You must never wait in pain. You must see to it straightaway. It doesn’t go away by pretending it isn’t there.

Virtue

Courage, as Maya Angelou put it, is the most important of the virtues because “without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.”

Courage is essential for us to look at ourselves without shying away.

True virtue is something we achieve by looking inward, to our own motives and flaws and cravings, and addressing those sticky and difficult and contradictory parts of ourselves.

Virtue is a journey, not a destination.

An asymmetric tree is one hundred percent a tree

It was important to know how things could be perfect in order to make them better, was the general idea.

The trouble with perfect abstract ideals that we want to reach is that we never get there.

Work with what you have. Exist in this world. Be the asymmetric square. Be the wonky tree. Be the real you.

You are more than your worst behavior

We need kindness. We need a way to see the difference between who people are and what they sometimes do. And that includes us.

The way out of your mind is via the world

Curiosity and passion are the enemies of anxiety.

Find a passion as large as your fear.

The way out of your mind is via the world.

Protection

It is better to let people down than to blow yourself up.

Quantum freedom

A key defining feature of the universe, of nature, of our environment, of us, is uncertainty. There is always a space for chance.

Applied energy

Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything.

Mess

The hardest thing to be is yourself. We are so overloaded that we can’t always see the truth of who we are.

Pomegranate

Much of gossip is envy in disguise. Much of self-doubt is conformity in disguise.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” said Eleanor Roosevelt.

Watch the stars

Beauty is any moment that makes us gasp with the hope and wonder of life, and the world is full of such moments.

The Stoic slave

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters.

Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.

Epictetus reminds us that when we tie our happiness to external things,
we are essentially giving up the idea of self-control and placing our well
being on forces outside of ourselves.

Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.

Even in pain or sadness or confinement, the mind has power to choose its response to the events in our lives.

Caterpillar

The greatest changes stem from the darkest experiences. We fall apart to become new. We go through the dark to fly in the sun.

A bit about breathing

Breath is a kind of in-built mood barometer.

Breathing consciously seems to be a way to hack into your self-esteem. A
way to say Give yourself a break. A way to just accept you as you and life
as life. And all you need is a pair of lungs.

Live in the raw

The true challenge we face is to look at ourselves and the world honestly.

As Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön put it, “the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.” Healing means to live in the raw.

The cure for loneliness

Loneliness is felt when we are lost.

The cure for loneliness is understanding who we are.

Ferris Bueller and the meaning of life

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Negative capability

Negative capability was about being able to think intuitively, outside of memory and desire.

To leave space for a new idea.

The comfort of uncertainty

The only way, ultimately, to deal with uncertainty is to accept uncertainty. Because we can’t escape it.

And one way to deal with it is to see the value in uncertainty. Far from being a curse, uncertainty can be a source of hope.

Opposites

Opposites rely on each other to exist.

Possibility

Joy is the experience of possibility. The consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s destiny. In this sense despair . . . can lead to joy. After despair, the one thing left is possibility.

The door

Everything in front of us is defined by possibility.

Basic nowness

Giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end.

End

Nothing truly ends.
It changes