How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?

It is less a headache and more a memory ache. A life ache.

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human.

The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.

Sometimes things are a change for the better and the worse at the same time,

doesn’t matter how long you live. Small talk remains equally complex.)

What is legacy but the most empty and mediocre substitute for what we have.

It felt refined and tantalising all at once, like a polite collective pre-orgasm.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.

eyes that shone like pebbles in a stream.

Time, I realise, is a weapon these days. Nothing weakens people like having to wait. In the street. With a knife in their hand.

‘Everything gets smaller over time. Computers, phones, apples, knives, souls.’

You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history.

‘Music is about time,’ I told her. ‘It is about controlling time.’

kiss,’ she said, ‘is like music. It stops time . . .

For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised

they – the terror, the love – were one and the same thing.

A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does.

This is the point of being a teacher. A glimmer of hope where you thought it didn’t exist.

But there is no moral to this tale, except with mirth and laughter let wrinkles come.’ I

‘That’s what we need to work on. You know, for when a moment of happiness floats along. We could swing our net and catch it like a butterfly, and have that moment for ever.’

There is no possible way of living in a world without books or trees or sunsets. There just isn’t.

‘We are the invisible threads of history,’

The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.

‘Anxiety,’

the dizziness of freedom.’

The whole place feels like a polite euphemism for death.

‘There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.’

Mana was a special power. A supernatural power. It could be good or evil but it always had to be respected.

The craft

People you love never die.

While knowledge without integrity is dangerous, integrity without knowledge is weak and useless.

‘A wave can kill you. Or you can ride it.

After all, we aren’t just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us.

‘“I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.”’

To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it.

understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it.