A Look On The Lighter Side: The perfectly named little book of comfort

0
A Look On The Lighter Side: The perfectly named little book of comfort

I have been reading something called “The Comfort Book” by Matt Haig. Well, reading might be too formal a term. I’ve been devouring it. It’s a small book, digestible in one sitting if you’re so inclined, but also designed with very small chapters, so you can dip in and out of it at will. It fits easily by your bedside or in a backpack and has lots of lovely white space.

It is a compilation of thoughts, poems, music, quotations, stories and even a few recipes — all things that Haig calls his “life rafts” for getting through difficult times.

Haig knows his way around hard times. He is a noted author of many works for both adults and children. His most recent novel was “The Midnight Library,” a New York Times bestseller and Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction.

Despite these and other accomplishments, however, Haig has wrestled all his life with depression, panic disorder and sometimes suicidal thoughts. He writes about some of it here:

“When I was 24 I was convinced I would never see my 25th birthday. I knew for certain that I wouldn’t be able to survive for weeks or months with the mental pain I was suddenly encountering. And yet here I am, aged 45, writing this paragraph. Depression lies. And while the feelings themselves were real, the things they led me to believe were resolutely not.”

The pandemic was Haig’s impetus for creating the book he most needed to read — with the added hope that it might be useful to others as well. That’s why he kept it simple: “When I’m in a bad place, I often can’t read the most dense sort of academic book. I need something which is very clear, very easy to read, short chapters, short little lines. Sometimes I read it like a book of quotations.”

Some of these chapters are very short indeed. For example, “Short” on page 79 consists of just this: “Life is short. Be kind.” Most items are almost as brief, interspersed with a few fascinating biographies of such folks as muckraking journalist Nellie Bly and Juliane Koepcke, a teenager who survived a plane crash in the Amazon.

He includes one recipe for making hummus and another for mindfully spreading peanut butter on a piece of warm toast.

Perhaps you’ll relate to his observation that “It’s OK to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.”

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

Or “We are messy because the universe began with an explosion and the debris has drifted ever since.”

I enjoyed his rant about the current craze for self-improvement: “The Western idea of self-empowerment requires you to become better, discover your inner billionaire, get beach-bodied, work, upgrade. It says the present is not enough. It’s self-loathing masquerading as salvation. We need self-acceptance. Self-compassion.”

Over and over Haig’s message is: You are enough Just as you are. You are enough.

My favorites were his lists:
“Films that comfort” (“Toy Story 2” makes the cut!);
“Ten books that helped my mind,” and
“Ten things that won’t make you happier:
1. Wanting to be someone you aren’t.
7. Imagining happiness is the place you reach when you get
everything done.
10. The belief that you have to be happy.”

Not everything in this book will be for you or indeed perhaps for anyone but Matt Haig. But I can still recommend this book, because it makes a wonderful starting place for compiling a Comfort Book all your own.

For example, I went through his list of “Songs that comfort me,” playing each one on YouTube to judge for myself, putting check marks by some (“O-o-h Child,” by the Five Stairsteps works for me, too) and an X by others (“The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley just makes me sad).

It started me on a journey of discovery and of rediscovery. Songs that I loved but had forgotten then led me to others, which led to remembering times, places and people I had also forgotten until I needed another blank book to make lists of my own.

The best thing about “The Comfort Book” is how it liberates you to consider your own fears and comforts, your own loves and hates, your own mantras and your own life lessons. I came away with the exhilarating feeling of getting reacquainted with an old friend I hadn’t seen in far too long — myself!

No posts to display

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here