How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

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.”’

Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am working on that.

But the thing is: you cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.

Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or we think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard. And it’s good to think of the past. Those who cannot remember the past, observed the philosopher George Santayana in 1905, are condemned to repeat it. And you only need to switch on the news to see the dreadful repetitions, the terrible unlearned lessons, the twenty-first century slowly becoming a crude cover version of the twentieth.

But from now on, I am going to exist in the open. I am not going to let secrets hurt people any more.

‘Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.’

It is clear. In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.