The Comfort Book

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 silve

Maybe we aren’t meant to know everything about our lives. And maybe that’s perfectly okay.

It is good to be weird. It is good to be eccentric. It is good to be separate from the crowd. The philosopher John Stuart Mill thought it was almost a civic duty to be eccentric, to break the tyranny of conformity and custom. But even if we don’t feel outwardly eccentric, we all have eccentric parts. Thoughts that crop up on the peripheries of our

The hardest dream of all to achieve is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition. To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other people and other hypothetical selves, and to meet the momen

Your value is not a condition of productivity or exercise or body shape or something you lose via inactivity. Value is not a plate that needs to be continually spun. The value is there. It is intrinsic, innate. It is in the “being” not the “doing.”

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.

Even if we are at a point in life where we can’t appreciate things, it sometimes helps to remember there are things in this world to enjoy, when we are ready.

Crossroads Sometimes when we have a decision to make, we feel we need to be fast. Indeed, the word “decisive” is often used as a synonym of fast. But when we find ourselves at a crossroads it is often better to stop, wait a while at the lights and check the map. After all, movement isn’t progress if we are heading in the wrong direction.

In an age of overload, no is really yes. It is yes to having the space you need to live.