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Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.
There was an old musician’s cliché, about how there were no wrong notes on a piano. But her life was a cacophony of nonsense. A piece that could have gone in wonderful directions, but now went nowhere at all.
‘Between life and death there is a library,’
‘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?’
‘While the Midnight Library stands, Nora, you will be preserved from death. Now, you have to decide how you want to live.’
A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like,
a
few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff ma...
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‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’
‘So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’
sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’
Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquito bites. They itch for ever.
‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things,’ Mrs Elm said. ‘You must always remember that.’
‘If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it.
‘If one advances confidently,’ Thoreau had written in Walden, ‘in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with
a success unexpected in common hours.’ He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’
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.
To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.
‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’
‘We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’
It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.
