Choosing another life

I was tired of looking down at my phone.

A few weeks ago, I spent the week with my son driving cross country and would be spending much of the day waiting first in Las Vegas and then later in a layover waiting for my flight back home. I wasn’t planning on buying a book, but I also didn’t want to spend the day in one long death scroll on my phone.

I picked up Matt Haig’s 2020 book, The Midnight Library, and started reading. In the book, he ponders the infinite possibilities of life.

A young woman named Nora lives an ordinary life and feels unwanted and unaccomplished. One night, her despair gets to be too much to handle and she makes an attempt to take her life. She finds herself in a place called the Midnight Library, which exists between life and death and is filled with books in which lie endless parallel lives she might’ve lived. An old teacher she knew, who plays the role of facilitator, gives her the chance to undo her regrets by trying out these lives, starting right where her alternate self would’ve been on the night she ended her life.

While in the Midnight Library, Nora goes onto live hundreds of lives and becomes different versions of herself — some she’d never even considered — but she is faced with a difficult decision. She must decide what she is willing to sacrifice in order to live permanently in one of these ‘ideal’ lives, where they seem perfect for a time but, as she realizes, there are new sets of decisions and challenges awaiting.

Nora works to figure out what is really important in life. As I watched Nora make her decisions, I started so think about the choice and lives I’ve lived. Mine were certainly not as desperate as Nora’s, but they still made me think:

–What if I had chosen a different college? What if I worked or traveled before going to school? Where would I be if I had entered the Armed Forces after college?

–What if I went to law school and became a lawyer? Full time novel writer? Veterinarian? Business owner?

–What it I had accepted that first job offer in upstate New York, a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Canadian border, how would my life had changed?

—What if I had moved earlier to Northern Virginia? How would my life been? Would I have still met my wife?

—What if I wasn’t able to come up with the money for college? What would I have done then? Where would I have ended up?

In the end, I keep coming back to a quote Mrs. Elm says in the book. “If you really want to live a life hard enough, you don’t have to worry,” Mrs. Elm tells her. “The moment you decide you want that life, really want it, then everything that exists in your head now, including this Midnight Library, will eventually be a dream. A memory so vague and intangible it will hardly be there at all.”

And oh yea, how does the book end, spoiler alert . . . Nora learns that the messy life she had tried to exit now seems “full of hope.” She didn’t need a new life, she just needed to realize that her own had potential, and that she could keep reinventing herself until she achieved happiness.

Hmm, maybe there’s still time for my own business, or to write full-time, or a retirement full of Pina Coladas and a swimming pool and hot summer days. Oh, the choices.

All photos by Pexels.