The Life Impossible

by Matt Haig

‘I feel like I have a life inside me that needs to be lived and I am not living it.’

that grief and guilt and life had cauterised me and there was nothing new to experience. Just a wound to look at and keep prodding for a sign of feeling.

The trouble with having a change of scene is that if you get there and find that you feel just the same, then you really are trapped. And that was my conclusion. The problem hadn’t been Lincoln, or the bungalow, or my situation. The problem was me. There was no escape from grief and loneliness. So long as I stayed in the same ageing body with my same curdled memories, I was my own life sentence.

You see, if you want to visit a new world, you don’t need a spacecraft. All you need to do is change your mind.

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. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.