How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

It is over in two seconds but I think this is the moment in which I have to admit to myself that I am in love for the first time in four centuries.

It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.

I realise I would like to solve the mystery of her just as much as she wants to solve the mystery of me and she nestles a little into me and I put my arm around her.

‘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.’

Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before.

‘Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it’

But I sense it is getting closer. Life. I sense it, just inches ahead of me.

People you love never die

People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation.

It seems the perfect way to live. Riding a wave, falling off, getting back on. So much of life seems to be based around the idea of rising, of building something up – income or status or power – of living a kind of upward life, as vertical as a skyscraper. But Omai’s existence seems as natural as the ocean itself, as wide and open as the horizon.

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

That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.’

Ugh. My heart

‘You simply can’t fall in love and not think there is something bigger ruling us. Something, you know, not quite us. Something that lives inside us, caged in us, ready to help us or fuck us over. We are mysteries to ourselves. Even science knows that. We have no fucking idea how our own minds work.’

‘A wave can kill you. Or you can ride it. It’s sometimes more dangerous to shy away. You can’t live your life in fear, Tom. You have to be prepared to get on your board and stand on your feet. If you are in the barrel of a wave you have to ignore the fear. You have to be in that moment. You have to carve on through. You get scared, and the next thing you know you are off your board and smashing your head on a rock.

There is a world in which he lives and there is a world in which he is dead. And the move between the two happens with no greater ricochet than the whisper of waves crashing onto distant rocks.

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

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.

History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

I feel at the beginning of something. I feel ready to care and be hurt and take a risk on living.

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