The Midnight Library: A Thing I Have Learned

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 talent, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d work 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 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 version of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our times run 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 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 grapes 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 wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever. 

Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, the 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 I want to live? 
Yes. Yes.

 A thousand times, yes. 

*spoiler alert* 

A Thing I Have Learned is a chapter from the wonderfully written book The Midnight Library. I love the book a lot and this specific chapter consists of what the main character wrote in her social media when she realized the endless potential she has in her life. 

Another reason why I decided to re-write this chapter and put it on my blog is that this is what the main character wrote after she deleted all of her suicidal posts and after she survived her suicide attempt when she realized that she wants to live. I always have a soft spot in my heart for a flourishing human being, a blooming creature. And what Nora Seed wrote is just an outstandingly humble reminder for me, and us. I suppose.