The Life Impossible

by Matt Haig

When I was a child, I once went on holiday to the Isle of Wight, and I had made friends with an odd woman in a fudge shop in Yarmouth who believed she was a former mermaid. Maybe it was islands. Maybe they sent people insane.

Sarcasm is my nervous tic.

I had spent a lifetime hating my appearance in the present and then appreciating it in retrospect.

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.

Being open to possibility is being open to pain, failure, disappointment, so the temptation is to curl ourselves up like armadillos.

Alberto danced with the energised chaos of a gorilla who had been shot in the bottom, complete with hairy chest on flamboyant show, while his daughter was gifted with an equal lack of self-consciousness but considerably more rhythm.

People think of a protest as something angry, or something earnestly hopeful, but it can also be something quite meditative and healing. It is about being part of something bigger. A kind of selflessness, in the true sense of the word.

Although humans tend to imagine the existence of alien life as a predatory threat, that has more to do with our own predatory nature reflecting back at us than the reality of unrecognised life we have encountered.’