Notes on a Nervous Planet(48)

Everything we need is right here. Everything we are is enough. We don’t need the bigger boat to deal with the invisible sharks around us. We are the bigger boat. The brain, as Emily Dickinson put it, is bigger than the sky. And by noticing how modern life makes us feel, by allowing that reality and by being broad-minded enough to change when change is healthy, we can engage with this beautiful world without being worried it will steal who we are.





Beginning

I LOOK AT the clock on my computer.

I do this now to keep track of how long I spend staring at a screen. Simply knowing the amount makes you spend less time at a computer. I suppose that’s the key: being aware.

Another awareness. I am aware of the dog, now, beside my feet.

And I am also aware of the view.

The sun is shining outside my window. I can see the sea in the distance. An offshore wind farm on the horizon, little lines of hope. A criss-cross of telegraph wires slicing the scene like lines in an abstract painting. Rooftops and chimneys pointing towards the sky we rarely observe.

I stare at the sea, and it calms me. And I am trying to be in tune with what it is about this world that makes us feel good. This is how we can live in the present. This is how every single moment becomes a beginning. By being aware. By stripping away the stuff we don’t need and finding what our self really requires. And from that awareness we can find a way to keep hold of ourselves and still stay in love with this world. That’s the idea. It’s hard. It’s so bloody hard. But also, it is better than despair. And so long as you make sure it isn’t something else you can fail at, once you accept your messy flaws and failures as natural, then it becomes a lot easier.

Later today I will be going to a shopping centre. I don’t enjoy shopping centres, but I no longer have panic attacks in them. The key to surviving shopping centres and supermarkets and negative online comments or anything else is not to ignore them, or to run from them, or to fight them, but to allow them to be. Accept you don’t have any control over them, only over yourself.

‘For after all,’ wrote the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.’ Yes. Let it rain. Let the planet be. You have no choice. But also, be aware of your feelings, good and bad. Know what works for you and accept what doesn’t. When you know the rain is rain, and not the end of the world, it makes things easier.

But, right now, it isn’t raining.

And so, the second after finishing this page, I am going to save this document and close the laptop and head outside.

Into air and sunlight.

Into life.





People I’d like to thank

I WOULD LIKE to thank all the people I have met in real life or online over the last few years who have found the courage to talk about their mental health. The more we talk, the more we encourage others to do the same.

Although books have, ridiculously, only one name on the front they are typically a team effort, and this one more than most. Firstly, I owe infinite and ongoing gratitude to my great, warm, fearless and tireless agent Clare Conville, and everyone who works with her at C+W and Curtis Brown.

I must thank my wonderful and long-suffering editor Francis Bickmore at Canongate, and all the other clever people who read early versions including my brilliant editors across the ocean – my US editor Patrick Nolan at Penguin Random House, and Kate Cassaday at HarperCollins Canada. Also, this book would not be this book without the sharp eyes of Alison Rae, Megan Reid, Leila Cruickshank, Jo Dingley, Lorraine McCann, Jenny Fry and Canongate head honcho Jamie Byng. Thanks also to Pete Adlington for his sumptuous work on the cover and all the team at Canongate who have worked so hard on this book and my others, including Andrea Joyce, Caroline Clarke, Jess Neale, Neal Price, Alice Shortland, Lucy Zhou and Vicki Watson.

Thanks to all the social media friends who have allowed me to quote them in this book.

Of course, thanks to Andrea, for being this book’s first and most honest reader and for being someone who makes life on this nervous planet less nerve-racking. And apologies to Pearl and Lucas for this book ironically causing me to spend more time staring at a laptop than usual.

And thanks to you for choosing this book out of the near-infinity of books out there. It means a lot.



‘Warm and engaging, and shot through with humour’

Sunday Times



‘A rollicking time-hopping fantasy . . . Will provoke wonder and delight’

Observer



‘Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin’ Jeanette Winterson