The Life Impossible

by Matt Haig

I have never believed in magic, and I still don’t. But sometimes what looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet.

You should be able to feel something. I mean, that’s the most basic and essential form of existence, isn’t it? Feeling.

There is always an element of unpredictability in even the most predictable things. And if you lived like it wasn’t there, then life would pull the rug from under you, so you might as well embrace the .14159.

This is the challenge of life, isn’t it? Moving forward without annihilating what has gone before. Knowing what to clasp onto and what to release without destroying yourself. Trying not to be the meteor and the dinosaur at once.

Someone once told me the way to die happy is to die complete. To live like you eat a delicious meal. To devour and enjoy every course so that when you have finished you are full, and enjoyed every mouthful, but aren’t too sad there is no more.

Of course, weeds don’t really exist. They are only a matter of perception. If someone doesn’t like a dandelion growing on their lawn, they will call it a weed out of spite, because we human beings have to draw a line between everything. Us/them. Mathematics/poetry. Weed/flower.

when you ‘have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’.

Anhedonia.

Sometimes in order to be helpful we have to give up the desire to be liked.

It is funny how, at my age, the sight of something always prompts a memory of something that lay further behind it. There is no such thing as a pure present in this book of life. You can always see the words from the page before, their inky shadows darkening what is in front of you. Or at least dulling it.

The point of desperation is often the point of truth.

If only we could always have the perspective of the future with us as we live that present.

Everything looks obvious after history has tamed it. But at the time it was like finding proof of alien life. We are never at the end of history. And we are not at the end of science.’

But grief was the death of a person, this was the death of everything I had considered reality.

Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

People say that love is rare. I am not so sure. What is rare is something even more desirable. Understanding. There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love. They are in love with their loving. To be understood. And not only that, but to be understood and appreciated once understood. That is what matters.

unlikely my life had become. Or maybe it had always been unlikely. Maybe that’s the truly ridiculous thing, the way we don’t even blink at the sheer improbability of our lives here on this rock spinning through space.

suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion.

All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.

If you really want to make wonderful discoveries, as any good armadillo knows, you eventually have to remove your head from your bottom and look out at the bright, confusing day.

It is impossible to feel life so deeply and not want to protect it…

surreptitiously

had to protect the people and the place around me. Wasn’t that the ultimate reason? After so many years of feeling unnecessary to the universe, I felt truly needed. And it’s nice to be needed. It really is.

Guilt arrived with happiness, or trailed closely in its wake.

‘There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness…’

Life is all chiaroscuro. Its meaning is derived from relative difference.

Maybe that was what madness was: the loneliness of understanding what others can’t.

I love that word ‘spoiler’, don’t you? The idea that if we know what is about to happen, it takes the enjoyment from it. It’s so strange that we don’t want spoilers in our stories but we seek them in our lives. We want to know we will fall in love, or be healthy, or finish the degree in style, get the good job or the comfortable pension. We want the solution. We want it all mapped out. We want to know everything ends well. We want it all spoiled, with as little mystery as possible. But where is the fun in that? And take it from someone with gifts of precognition beyond all the world’s population: there are no real spoilers. There is always an observer effect. There is always an unknown variable, and that unknown variable is often yourself. Embrace the mystery would be my advice.