“If you fit in, you disappear, right?”
In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that Matt Haig's The Midnight Library1 has become one of my favorite books. Of course, as soon as I finished The Midnight Library, I had to order another book by Matt Haig, and I chose The Life Impossible2. What a beautiful name!
Although The Life Impossible was not as captivating as The Midnight Library, it was full of super valuable life lessons that I never want to forget. So, here I am writing this newsletter so that I can remember those life lessons whenever I need to. And, of course, I want to share these messages with as many people as possible:)
“I am definitely no role model, as will probably become clear. I have felt a lot of guilt in my life. And in a way, this is a story about that. I hope you find some of it valuable.”
“I feel like I have a life inside me that needs to be lived and I am not living it.”
“And certainly never became rich, in the conventional sense, as you can see from this modest house. But I have had a rich life, and discovered things I never could have dreamed of.”
“The problem was me. There was no escape from grief and loneliness. So long as I stayed in the same ageing body with my same curdled memories, I was my own life sentence.”
“When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don’t meet ourselves in the light and air. We don't understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.”
“If only we could always have the perspective of the future with us as we live that present.”
“Eating watermelon in the sun was such a wonderful feeling I wondered why I hadn’t spent more of my life doing it. I wondered why it wasn’t everyone’s aspiration. I wondered why every successful businessperson on the planet continued to work and visit offices and stare at computers when they could just quit and eat watermelon in the sun for ever.”
“You see, if you want to visit a new world, you don’t need a spacecraft. All you need to do is change your mind.”
“I man, fuck, how can you live a life if you know everything that is going to happen?”
“… it was her stealing the thing that makes life life. You know, the unpredictability.”
“I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion.
All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.”
“Indeed, the willingness to be confused, I now realise, is a prerequisite for a good life. Wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison, it really can, because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be. You end up closed. You end up shutting doors to so many possibilities. I was drawn to mathematics because of its certainties, because I wanted closed doors, and simplicity, but life isn’t like that. And nor, in fact, is mathematics. You can’t ever fully unweave the rainbow, because mathematics and science and essential truth aren’t deprived of magic and mystery.”
“If you fit in, you disappear, right?”
“Home needs a reason. And there was now a reason, a purpose, for being there.”
“Wasn’t that the ultimate reason? After so many years of feeling unnecessary to the universe, I felt truly needed.
And it’s nice to be needed. It really is.”
“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness…”
“Life is all chiaroscuro. Its meaning is derived from relative difference.”
“To truly enhance your abilities, and reach the next level, your mind must be free of mental pollution. And nothing pollutes and clogs a mind as thoroughly as guilt…”
“Everyone is a flawed person. That’s what being a person is.”
“Maybe that was what madness was: the loneliness of understanding what others can’t.”
“He was full of pride and shame, ego and insecurity, cold and heat, fear and determination, apathy and passion, reservation and impulsivity, everything and nothing. He was a sitting paradox. A terminally flawed lifeform. He was, in short, a human.”
“The only thing I ask is that you leave a door open in your mind to possibility. We are never at the finish line of understanding.”
“I love the word ‘spoiler,’ don’t you? The idea that if we know what is about to happen, it takes the enjoyment from it.
It’s so strange that we don’t want spoilers in our stories but we seek them in our lives. We want to know we will fall in love, or be healthy, or finish the degree in style, get the job or the comfortable pension. We want to the solution. We want it all mapped out. We want to know everything ends well. We want it all spoiled, with as little mystery as possible. But where is the fun in that? And take it from someone with gifts of precognition beyond all the world’s population: there are no real spoilers. There is always an observer effect. There is always an unknown variable, and that unknown variable is often yourself. Embrace the mystery would be my advice.
Embrace the impossibility of it all.
Enjoy the not-knowing.
Don’t rush to the wedding or the death or the amen.”
“What feels impossible now won’t always be.”
Do you agree that ‘if you fit in, you disappear’?
Cheers,
Sidika
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Great share, wise and true lines from Mr.Haig. I guess we will always have those unlived dreams, undone plans, etc in life…that failing mode, those derailed plans…I think we should also learn how to accept things. Not quite sure of anything though. Thanks for the post Sıdıka. Cherio.
Hi Sıdıka, thanks for sharing. When I read your title "If you fit in, you disappear, right?', my first thought was that this would be on the differences between adaptation, integration and assimilation. But look how it turned out:) We make choices and pour our energy there where we want to, but most of the time this choice is made subconsciously. I feel the more we analyse and get to know ourselves within, the more conscious we make our choices. As we live and grow I wonder how close we really can get to ourselves. Have a nice Sunday all.