The Life Impossible

by Matt Haig

But sometimes what looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet.

It is such a ridiculous thing, isn’t it? The way we judge our bodies. The way, as we become increasingly invisible with age, we still clutch tight to that self-consciousness. The way we curse the thing that has kept us alive all this time. I doubt a sparrow resents its wings, even when its feathers are dried and withered.

One of the most interesting and sentimental of all facts, one that I have always loved, is the one that says we are all stardust. The whole universe is inside us. Every element within us was made in a star. Nitrogen, calcium, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and all the other stuff. We are made of deep space and deep time and have been forged in supernovas (or supernovae, if we are being pretentious). An element, as you no doubt know, is matter that can’t be broken down into a simpler substance. They are the primes of the cosmos. We are made of elements. We have the unbreakable and the eternal inside us.

Indeed, the willingness to be confused, I now realise, is a prerequisite for a good life. Wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison, it really can, because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be. You end up closed. You end up shutting doors to so many possibilities.

It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself.

Sometimes the rules of who we are supposed to be need to be broken. Sometimes we need to obey something deeper.

But that is how we beat death. We beat death by living while we are here. Death may be infinite, but, as we know, infinity is a relative concept. We can create a bigger infinity out of life. By feeling.

You said you felt you are in a pattern. A sequence. And you are. But it is vast and magnificent, this sequence. It connects you to every single thing in the universe. And one day it will surprise you in its expanse.

Life sings and blazes. Even when we are numb to it, when we hide from it, when it is too loud and painful to experience, when we aren’t equipped to feel it – it is there, waiting, to be cherished and protected, ready to give us at least one more blast of beauty before the night.