Ep 33 : Midnight Library – Do you mourn other lives you could have lived?

Have you ever mourned other lives you could have lived?

Pursued other subjects or picked a career path very different from the one you are on?

When I was growing up, my childhood ambition was to become a doctor – a neurosurgeon at that.

I was fascinated by what I thought they did.

The reason I didn’t end up as one was a culmination of factors – including the fact that my parents’ didn’t trust in my marriage prospects if I did become one.

That is the premise this book seeks – The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

what if you could live all the other lives you wanted to live?

The protagonist Nora Seed wants to die.

The young women’s life is in shambles – one she thinks is because of all the terrible choices she has made.

She has lost her job, her cat, her brother and her best friend.

She seems to be on the verge of a bleak future she can’t seem to getting better.

So she decides to end it all

And the world goes black.

But she wakes up – not in heaven or hell but a place in between

The midnight library – the place between life and death.

Interestingly with her school librarian – Mrs Elm in it.

She proclaims – 

 “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 variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living”

And so she does – exploring through each book every regret or possibility. What if she had actually married the fiance – the marriage she called off 2 days ahead of the event.

Or stuck with the music band

Or moved to Australia with her best friend

Or listened to her dad and followed his path to her career

What if?

That is a question I have asked myself often.

And that is the question the midnight library seeks to help with.

Nora struggles across these multiple lives she flits through even as she tries to reconcile her imagination to the potential reality

“The only way to learn is to live”, Mrs Elm says sagely.

We think we want certain things and that life will become easier once we get there. We ignore the journey with eye only on the goal post.

Is the reward of life in the living itself.

Nora lives hundreds of lives – seeking out a life – flitting across each without really knowing what she wants.

Which life will she choose?

If you have infinite possibilities and choices – how do you choose?

Or better still, does the choice matter?

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better or been more popular…. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not 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 versions would of been better or worse. …we have to focus on.”

While I once aspired to become a doctor – looking back I think it is one of those fascinations that is better in my imagination than in reality.

I still am besotted by science and learning about the brain. So while I have more physicians on my Linkedin connections than I can logically explain, the point is that, it is easy to glorify what we do not have.

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail.

Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you”