book 3 of 2021: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 

This book was quite an intriguing story that I just can't stop reading. It was quite an eye opening book where I've learnt to really appreciate every little things in life. Really enjoyed it!

The story is about how between life and death there is a temporary time and space where the person "dying" experiences. Then in that library there are tonnes of books and the person was able to choose any books and experience any other possible livelihoods that they may have. 

One significant quote that I found:

"Every life contains many millions of decisions, some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs which in turn leads to further variation"

 

The final letter after the character decided to go back to living (which I found really impactful):

A Thing I Have Learned (Written by a nobody who has been everybody)

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

We can't tell if any of those other version would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

We only need to be one person.

We only need to feel one existence.

We don't have to do everything in order to be everything because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

So let's be kind to the people in our own existence. Let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because whatever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on forever.

Yesterday I know I had no future and that it was impossible for to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential.

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No.

But do you want to live?

Yes. Yes.

A thousand times, yes.

xx