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‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices…Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
‘Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’
The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.
‘The only way to learn is to live.’
Other lives that would have been different if you’d taken different directions earlier in your life. This is a tree of life.
doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.
‘The only way to learn is to live.’
Rune,
The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.
A Moment of Extreme Crisis in the Middle of Nowhere
And she knew then, more than she’d known anything, that she wasn’t ready to die.
The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, even though they happen literally millimetres away from us.’
‘Science tells us that the “grey zone” between life and death is a mysterious place. There is a singular point at which we are not one thing or another. Or rather we are both. Alive and dead. And in that moment between the two binaries, sometimes, just sometimes, we turn ourselves into a Schrödinger’s cat who may not only be alive or dead but may be every quantum possibility that exists in line with the universal wave function, including the possibility where we are chatting in a communal kitchen in Longyearbyen at one in the morning…’
‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely.
‘The only reason I am still in this life is because of you…’
‘If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there’?
You can have everything and feel nothing. @NoraLabyrinth, 74.8K Retweets, 485.3K Likes
‘I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,’ she said, realising something for the first time. ‘But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths.
It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living.
sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.
It seems impossible to live without hurting people.’ ‘That’s because it is.’ ‘So why live at all?’ ‘Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too.
Why Want Another Universe If This One Has Dogs?
‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’
some truths were just impossible to see.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind.
Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.
the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.
She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
