The Comfort Book (iii.)

The Comfort Book

Matt Haig

“I didn’t need to go out and grab life. I was life.”

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这是The Comfort Book最后一辑了。书里满满名言警句，浓浓暖暖鸡汤，但可惜我喜欢读“something negative”。不过不过，这本书不失为不带脑随手好物啦。

Ferris Bueller and the meaning of life ref: Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) is the best teen movie of all time but for years I had a problem with it, even though I enjoyed it immensely. John Hughes’s tale of a popular teenager skipping school by faking illness, then having a sensational day out in Chicago with his best friend and girlfriend, annoyed me because I thought Ferris was selfish and this seemed like a movie where liking the central character was essential for its enjoyment. My issue was that he uses his best friend, Cameron, by making him take his dad’s vintage Ferrari on their adventure, even though Cameron will get in major trouble for this. Rewatching the movie, though, I realized I’d got it all wrong. Really, this isn’t a movie about the eponymous Ferris. This is a movie about Cameron. Cameron is the emotional center of the film. He is the one who makes the most significant transition—from a depressed, possibly suicidal, outwardly privileged teenager who frets about the perceived meaninglessness of a future containing college and adulthood, to someone with self-esteem, who is able to live in the present, and to stand up to his strict father and his oppressive rules. When Ferris starts the movie with his famous monologue he talks straight to the camera, but the core message is one he spends the rest of the film teaching Cameron: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Ferris is basically a 1980s version of Marcus Aurelius saying, “Dwell on the beauty of life.” He is a mix of Eastern and Western philosophy. Buddhist mindfulness fused with American individualism—though he wouldn’t want to be part of any -ism. “A person shouldn’t believe in an -ism,” says Ferris. “He should believe in himself.” But Ferris isn’t just out for himself. He is out for his friend too. He is out for us. As with all the most comforting films, the film gives us permission to feel. It helps us live.
Films that comfort Jaws. Because it shows that we need to acknowledge our fears before we beat them. Meet Me in St. Louis. Because of the songs. Because of the colors. Because of Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Because it invites us into the beautiful and bittersweet comfort of another time, another place, another family, another reality. And because I watched it on a day I felt terrible and it gave me a better place to exist. The Great Escape. Because it shows that you can cope with any situation so long as you are building a tunnel out of it. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Because it exudes a golden fireside glow and makes us remember that we can live forever inside a freeze-frame if it is a good enough moment (see also the end of The 400 Blows and The Breakfast Club). E.T. Because you become a child again when you watch it. It’s a Wonderful Life. Because it makes you realize your existence has unseen value. The Peanut Butter Falcon. Because it shows the redemptive power of friendship. The Count of Monte Cristo (2002 version). Because this swashbuckling adventure is the definition of escapism. Pretty in Pink. Because it has the greatest pop soundtrack in the history of cinema. Ray . Because well-crafted biopics are always inspiring, especially when the subject is Ray Charles. My Neighbor Totoro. Because Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece is a film about the power of wonder and magic to comfort us through traumatic times. Harvey . Because it is James Stewart talking to an invisible rabbit. Breaking Away . Because it is a highly underrated film about cycling that I watched when I was feeling low and found solace in its gentle comedy and drama. Any Mission Impossible movie. Because there is something comforting about watching Tom Cruise risk his life to defy the laws of Newtonian physics. The Sound of Music. Because it shows how love and music and joy can’t be suppressed by the darkest forces in history. Bringing Up Baby . Because of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and because, despite being released in 1938, it remains one of the funniest films ever made. Toy Story 2. Because it is the greatest and most emotional and consoling Pixar movie, for Jessie’s story alone. Stand by Me. Because despite being a film about a search for a dead body, it is a celebration of youth and friendship and life. Mary Poppins. Because it is Mary Poppins.
The poet John Keats coined the phrase “negative capability”: meaning when someone “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It’s about embracing a kind of vulnerability.…Keats never heard Miles Davis play, but maybe he’d have recognized negative capability in his music. “Don’t play what’s there,” the musician famously said. “Play what’s not there.”….“With a great poet,” wrote Keats, the most Zen of the Romantics, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”…For Bion, negative capability was about being able to think intuitively, outside of memory and desire. “Discard your memory,” he implored. “Discard the future tense of your desire; forget . . . both what you knew and what you want, to leave space for a new idea.” A new idea. I love that. It’s like the Zen Buddhist concept of satori, of enlightenment through submission, something reached through a quest into the uncertainties of our own nature.satori（日本佛教禅宗用语）开悟...I always remember once, years ago, doing a workout video where the instructor bellowed an order, midway through a static squat, to “get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Now, it may be a bit of a reach to equate advice offered in a workout to negative capability and Zen Buddhism, but I feel we reach a higher kind of comfort, a closer union with who we 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.
The capacity for fucking up. And for forgiving.
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.
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.
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 with that.
The moments of deepest pain in my life were also the moments I learned the most about myself. Just as some of the things we look forward to aren’t as good as we planned—like a disastrous vacation or a nightmare job that sounded good on paper, a marriage that turned sour—so it is true that many of the hard things in life arrive with lessons or silver linings or a welcome new perspective or reasons to be grateful.
The only certainty is uncertainty. And so, if we are to reach any kind of constant comfort, we need to find comfort in uncertainty. And it is there. Because while things are uncertain, they are never closed. We can exist in hope, in the infinite, in the unanswered and open question of life itself.
Portal Each of us has the power to enter a new world. All we have to do is change our mind.
The film director Jean-Luc Godard said a story should have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. And I used to love that quote, and agree with it, until I went through a breakdown and craved the comfort of classic narratives. Of beginnings and middles and ends in that order. And I liked endings that wrapped things up nicely, with a big bow.
As the Buddhist thinker Pema Chödrön puts it, “we suffer from resolution.” I find that idea so liberating. To admit that closure is unreachable in a universe where everything is open.
The bearable rightness of being Being > doing
Or, in my case, a total breakdown. A full smorgasbord of doom. Panic disorder, depression, OCD, agoraphobia, and a belief that I wouldn’t be able to go on living through so much. Which is the irony, of course. My desperate desire to avoid pain and discomfort led to me feeling the worst pain and discomfort of my life. It trapped me inside it. For days, months, years.agoraphobia 广场恐怖症/旷野恐怖症
“Inspiration and wretchedness complement each other,” as Chödrön puts it. But what is good about suffering? What can be comforting about suffering? Isn’t suffering the opposite of comfort?
I didn’t need to go out and grab life. I was life.
A spinning coin Uncertainty is the cause of anxiety, but also a solution. While everything is uncertain, everything is hope. Everything is ambiguous. Everything is possible. We exist on a spinning coin. We cannot predict how it will land but we can enjoy the shine as it spins.
And numbers—and comparisons—are everywhere. Social media followers. Body measurements. Income brackets. Age. Weight. Online rankings. Click counts. Unit sales. Likes. Shares. Step counts. Sleep counts. Word counts. Test scores. House prices. Budget reports. Stock market valuations. Numbers, numbers, numbers. And the numbers get in. They make us compare....Only finite things can be measured, after all.
Power The most powerful moment in life is when you decide not to be scared anymore.
Often we need to fail in order to learn, just as a bodybuilder needs weight to resist against. It is impossible to grow in a world without struggle....Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I can remember that when I was first in the middle of a deep depression, I wasn’t just feeling depressed. I was feeling depressed about feeling depressed. Anxious about feeling anxious. And so, inevitably, the negative feelings kept on multiplying themselves....To stop having panic attacks I had to get to a point where I almost invited them.But after a hundred or so panic attacks I realized something about them. They were self-referential. They fueled themselves. I mean: the panic became worse because I was panicking about the panic. It is a rolling snowball of its own making. But if I stopped myself being frozen about the panic, if I melted into a state of acceptance, the panic snowball ended up running out of the ice-cold terror and couldn’t grow. Eventually it would float right through. My mind would watch the panic rather than fight it. A totally different type of engagement.
In Tibetan the word re-dok is a portmanteau of the words rewa (hope) and dokpa (fear), acknowledging they coexist and both stem from essentially the same thing—uncertainty. When we analyze rather than evade our darkest fears, we learn that even our largest demons are not as invincible as they first appear. Often, when we stare at them, deeply, they disintegrate before our eyes.
Remember There will be other days. And other feelings.
As William Blake put it, “Joy and woe are woven fine.” I know this. Because one of the reasons I love life is because I was once suicidal. I have sincerely known more moments of contentment in my life for having gone through years of hell.
I now avoid trying to see myself as one thing or the other. I am not a happy person or a sad person. I am not a calm person or a fearful person. I am a happy-sad-calm-fearful person. I let myself feel it all, and that way I am always open to new feelings. Nothing gets clogged in the pipe. No single feeling becomes the only feeling, if you let it all happen. And the way to let it all happen is to see the value in it all. To see the way the dark might lead to light. And the way present pain might lead to future hope.
Albert Camus said, “There is no love of life without despair of life.” When I first came across that quote I thought it was empty and pretentious and more than a little bleak. But as I grew older the words became truer. My love of life stems almost directly from despair. In the sense that I am grateful for better times having known terrible times. But in a deeper sense too. In the sense that pleasure and despair are contained in the same whole, and when we start to see the connections between all things, when we see how opposites are contained within each other, when we see the way everything connects, we can feel more empowered at our lowest points.（这是一篇分析好句的典型作文吧。）
Possibility The existential philosopher Rollo May believed that we often mistake opposites. “Hate is not the opposite of love,” he said, “apathy is.” He also pointed out that courage and fear aren’t opposites, as fear is an essential component of bravery, and that the truly courageous are those who experience fear and move through it. He was most informative of all, though, when arguing for the compatibility of joy and despair. “Joy is the experience of possibility,” he wrote, “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.”
Acceptance There comes a beautiful point where you have to stop trying to escape yourself or improve yourself and just allow yourself.
In Buddhism there is the concept of mettā, or maitrī, meaning benevolence or “loving-kindness.” Mettā is about accepting yourself as you are. There is no intent to change you, but rather an acceptance of yourself and all things as change. As Pema Chödrön explains in When Things Fall Apart, what makes this concept radical is that there is no attempt to become a better person. It is about “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.” Once that happens, you can see that whatever you are feeling is within the normal human range and has been felt by humans since the beginning of our history. “Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.”
The world can surprise us, sure, but we can surprise ourselves too.
Nothing truly ends. It changes.
Love becomes grief. Grief becomes memory. Wounds become scars. Doing becomes being. Pain becomes strength. Noon becomes night.