The Life Impossible

by Matt Haig

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

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

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. His death created a hole right through me that could never again be filled.

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.

I wondered if I was starting a new era or if I was taking too much with me. 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.

The most expensive restaurant in the world is right here in Ibiza.

travel tesseracts experience. It explodes it to the fourth dimension.

But there is more to life than we know. And there is more to our minds than we realise.

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.

I am also a person who now realises that our human understanding of the world is incredibly limited, and that there is a bias not to believe things that don’t fit our worldview. What I am saying is that sometimes we can’t accept the truth that is right in front of our eyes. And that sometimes the mad people of one era become the sages of the next.

Dr Ribas, however, doubled down and even self-published a book called La vida imposible – or Impossible Life in English – claiming that he had proof of many occurrences of life forms that scientists consider ‘impossible’ existing here on planet Earth, primarily in the Balearic Islands.

Happiness in June in Ibiza was as common as equations in algebra,

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

And when you get older, as you wrote in the letter, it becomes harder to break patterns.

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

To be understood. And not only that, but to be understood and appreciated once understood. That is what matters.

The way we exist out of nothing, the way the whole universe exists out of nothing, and here we are, the impossible something that made existence out of the void. Impossible life. A fluke to be cherished.

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.

He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness…’

Embrace the mystery would be my advice. Embrace the impossibility of it all. Enjoy the not-knowing.

in mathematics, you realise that balance and symmetry is actually in everything, even when it feels like chaos or pain.