The Midnight Library

 

Nora is having a truly horrible day. life's never been easy as her wedding's off, her cat died, she's fired (twice), soaked through, & ghosted by family. her life's going nowhere. overwhelmed by regret & loneliness, with nothing to give, no one to love, & nobody loves her in return, Nora decides life's no longer worth living & she's done. but instead of her life ending, she lands in the Midnight Library, a place between life & death where she's able to live all the lives that would have been if she had made different choices. as she's experiencing a variety of potential lives, she gets to see her 'root' life with a newfound perspective. she's then torn between staying the course and plotting a new path.

i googled Matt Haig and he's apparently extremely popular with this kind of story. he writes about the idiosyncrasies of being human & what makes us tick. what's normal, what are other people’s lives like, what are we here for, what’s the point. this novel isn't as light as it looks. there's a lot of philosophy here, well pitched for non-philosophers. and i love it. so creative, thought-provoking, lyrical, & emotionally cathartic.

it teaches perspective, regrets, & how we should approach life. it's impossible to read this book without thinking about my own regrets & what i'd do differently. eventually, Nora has some fairly profound epiphanies about life which i've tucked away for those moments in life when i feel weighed down by similar regrets. my favorite part is about our limitless potential, the importance of moving forward rather than wallowing in "should haves" & how each life is valuable, even if we might not see it. every life is a mix of happiness & sadness, success & failure. the presence of downfalls doesn't always make life worth living.

Uncertainty

recently i learned about John Keats' idea of negative capability.

in its simplest form, Keats' theory describes the ability to accept uncertainty - the capacity to have two opposing ideas in your mind without trying to choose one over the other. it's the ability to believe that two contrasting things are true, both of them, and that they can exist side by side.

or, in other words, being satisfied with things that are unresolved.

and, well, wow. It struck a chord with me, this theory. how often i find myself trying to sort between black and white, yes and no, this way or that, when really, at the end of the day, what i'd actually like to settle on is both. yes and yes. true and true.

because it's possible, it is, to both love and loathe. to both admire and pity. to both appreciate and, just as truly, just as ardently, regret. it's possible that what's right is not just a matter of either/or, that it's not somewhere in-between, that it's simply both.

for whatever reason, it's difficult to accept ambiguity; it can be a struggle to embrace that sort of doubt. and yet it happens. to all of us.  at some point or another, we know in our hearts that it's not A or B.

it's C: all of the above.