Sequoia’s Reviews > The Midnight Library > Status Update

She no longer felt like she had to find some fulfillment as some imaginary perfect daughter or partner or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.

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. [..]. And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people.

You don’t have to UNDERSTAND life. You just have to LIVE it.

We don’t have to DO everything in order to BE everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

So let’s be kind to the people in our own experience. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other peoples worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. It takes no effort to kiss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do […]. It is easy to regret and keep regretting, […] until our time runs out.

Life begins on the other side of despair.
— Sartre

A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing. Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse.

I AL ALIVE.

She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn’t depressing, as she once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work. […]. What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. […]. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.

She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or a traveler, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or the million other things, but she was still in some way ALL those people. They were all her.