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.

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

There are two kinds of ghosts that torment you when a young person dies. The ghost of who they were, and the ghosts of who they could have been.

When you grieve someone you see their message in everything. Even in the sunlight on a blade of grass. The whole world becomes their translator.

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.

The one good thing about having regrets is that I no longer judge others too harshly.

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

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.

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.

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.

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