I’m currently reading The Comfort Book by Matt Haig and it’s definitely quite comforting. He writes, “Imagine yourself as a baby. You would look at that baby and think they lacked nothing. That baby came complete. Their value was innate from their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of a human life. And that value stays with us, even as it becomes easier to forget it. We stay precisely as alive and precisely as human as we were the day we were born. The only thing we need is to exist. And to hope.”
What happened to us along the way? We started listening to the messages we heard about what we should study, where we should live, and what we should believe.
We thought we were lacking when we actually had all we needed.
We looked at others like they had it all figured out. But as Rainer Maria Rilke’s quote mentioned at the start of the book, “Do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better… But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did.”
We all have a story. And as Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
What do we think of our lives? Of ourselves? Can we embrace our perfect imperfections as if we were that baby? Innocent and open and excited to just be? What comfort might that gift us?