Page 259 - The Midnight Library

www.urdukutabkhanapk.blogspot.com
www.urdukutabkhanapk.blogspot.com

A ing I Have Learned

(Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said
yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances
more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the
coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the
people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself
through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic
versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum,
until our time runs out.
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 people’s 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.
Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of
what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what
winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand
music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the
pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.
We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to
the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and
have access to the same emotional spectrum.
We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
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 existence. 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.
Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it
is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential.
The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.