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.

Anhedonia.

Do you know that word? The inability to feel pleasure.

When you have been a teacher, you always see the child in everyone. You imagine what they would have been like in class. Especially those who were just one step in front of that childhood.

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.

I always think that the quickest way to understand someone is to look at what’s on their bookshelves. Especially if they are honest bookshelves, not the fancy ornamental kind. And there was nothing fancy or ornamental about this place.

When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out.

We don’t understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.

because it felt like looking at a feeling. Yes. That was it. It felt like looking at a feeling. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that is the only way I can explain it. Like somehow it was love or hope I was looking at. Or rather, an emotion we don’t have a word for but which we feel at a deep level, one we keep buried, but which connects us. I was looking at something outside myself, obviously, but also somehow inside myself.

It’s always interesting, which countries go with which colours. Spain has a big thing for orange. Orange furniture. Orange trees. Even the earth in Ibiza is orange.

‘The only thing you have to believe at this point is that there is a possibility that we don’t know every single thing about life in the universe. That we aren’t so arrogant as to think that this particular point in history is the one where we know all there is to be known.

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.

I wanted to hear music.

The music came to me as colours and as tactile feeling, like something that could be seen and felt as well as heard. I stared at a book on the shelf. The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie. White letters on a blue spine. I had a profound sense that I could move it. As in, move it without physically moving it.

Eating watermelon in the sun was such a wonderful feeling I wondered why I hadn’t spent more of my life doing it. I wondered why it wasn’t everyone’s aspiration. I wondered why every successful businessperson on the planet continued to work and visit offices and stare at computers when they could just quit and eat watermelon in the sun for ever.

I suppose it was like a deep but inexplicable familiarity. As if I knew the whole world and its contents as well as I knew a close relative.

Like I had known everyone and everything and I only had to look at someone to know them. It was the interconnectedness of everything made visible. It is all there if you know how to see it.

The whole universe is inside us.

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.

I allowed myself a quiet chuckle over how ridiculously 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. The way we exist out of nothing, the way the whole universe exists out of nothing,

Why am I feeling like this? Two days ago, I was dead inside. Empty. I couldn’t feel anything. And now it is the opposite. I feel everything. And I didn’t sleep at all last night.’

‘You know where the phrase “brave new world” comes from?’ I asked. ‘Yes. Of course. Aldous Huxley. God of the hippies.’ I shook my head. ‘William Shakespeare. In The Tempest. A play about a crazy manipulative man on a magical island who likes the sound of his own voice and causes a lot of mischief because of a chip on his shoulder.’

It is called psychometry. The ability to understand a mind of someone just by touching something they touched.

I 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.

‘The moon. I think the moon is falling from the sky.’

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. I was drawn to mathematics because of its certainties, because I wanted closed doors, and simplicity, but life isn’t like that. And nor, in fact, is mathematics. You can’t ever fully unweave the rainbow, because mathematics and science and essential truth aren’t deprived of magic and mystery. They are magic and mystery. So don’t think that I was on some journey away from mathematics towards the mystical. Because that is not the journey I was on. I wasn’t abandoning mathematical truth, I was discovering it at a deeper level.

Wanting to look over life as if it is a test paper, and wanting a narrow neatness, order, cleanliness and control, is the basis for mental despair. Because it is a delusion. We are in this world. We are the test paper. We are a moving agent in an unfixed world in an ever-expanding cosmos.

‘I’m in my seventies. I’m too old for sentimental fridge-magnet theories and way too old for who I could be.’ Alberto tutted, doubtfully. ‘Well, I am seventy-nine. And I don’t own a fridge. And I love sentimental theories. I am a sentimental man. And I am booked in for my first samba class next Tuesday. Then I am going to Cova Santa to dance in a cave and drink lemonade. This is Ibiza. Age is nothing.’

‘I sometimes think people who don’t like sentimentality actually don’t like feeling anything at all. They prefer to look at the whole world with scorn.’

‘Well, I don’t care what you think. I was very fine not feeling anything at all. I don’t want to feel a single thing. And you had no right to make me.’

‘Shall we wait till tomorrow when you’ve had time to digest?’ I didn’t want a tomorrow of this. I wanted to go back. I would rather never have tasted the infinite new joy of orange juice than have all this. I didn’t want to dance in a cave. I wanted to sit on my sofa and numb myself in front of a quiz show. Allowing myself to feel infinite joy would ultimately lead me to feel infinite pain. And I had felt that and I didn’t want to go back there. I craved, suddenly, uneventful, familiar emptiness. I was actually missing anhedonia.

‘I am not talking about that. I am not talking about species. I am talking about thoughts. I am talking about the wall you have built around yourself. Why have you shut yourself away?’

I entered his mind completely now. It was wide open. Like a meadow. I went to him, inside his mind, and I was with him, and we just stayed there and we didn’t have to say anything. We were just together. In a state of understanding.

You see, people are like pieces of music. We don’t hear their songs because very few people play them out loud. But minds play their own notes,

There is nothing like tasting a fig straight from the tree, sun-warmed and tender. You can eat the whole of it. The whole thing. The skin, the purple flesh, the seeds. Divine. Eat the whole fig, that’s my advice. And take it from the tree, right in that moment, when you get the chance.

We are here for each other. The point of life is life. All life. We need to look after each other. And when it feels like we are truly, deeply alone, that is the moment when we most need to do something in order to remember how we connect.

We can’t just sit for ever in our lonely shells, making no sound.

To swim in the ocean, we sometimes have to make a splash.

I was suddenly back, fully inside my own self again, wondering what I had just witnessed.