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In Another Life
About
In Another Life
About
About

In Another Life… The Midnight Library Book Reflection

In another life close by, I did my master’s in English instead of teaching.
In another life, I teach elementary rather than high school.
In another life, I never found education at all.

In one far off life, I am an actor or singer or poet.
In one life, I’m a young single mother with infinite love for her only child.
In one life, I am traveling the world.

But something remains the same in all lives: “We spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad” (179). There will always be regrets, wishes for something different, and the grass will always be greener somewhere else.

So really, the most insidious thing about human consciousness is the ability to dream.

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” - Sylvia Plath 

With all the possibilities in the world, you can become paralyzed with thought, paralyzed by regret, and by what could have been. We are so focused on the future, on what could be or what we could become, that we forget to simply observe and appreciate what we have now. We willingly let time fly by and fill it with worry.

Matt Haig beautifully articulates the idea that, in all the time we spend wishing we were dead, wishing we had chosen a different path, or wallowing in our reality, we forget to remind ourselves of one simple, powerful truth…

“I AM ALIVE” (271).

At the end of the book, as Nora settles gratefully back into her root life, she recognizes the profound impact she had on people she originally saw as minor characters in her life. The young boy she taught piano to goes down the wrong path without music as a source of solace. Mr. Banerjee, Nora’s elderly neighbor, loses his independence without her helping hand, ending up unhappily in a retirement home. He is not allowed to appreciate the garden outside as he once could in her root life. This realization, in turn, allows Nora to appreciate his garden that she helps him with and its “flowers she hadn’t appreciated before, which now mesmerized her with the most exquisite purple she had ever seen” (283).

I think the most powerful way to practice mindfulness in your root life is to simply look at ordinary things for longer. Notice what you haven’t seen before, and appreciate the profound impossibility of everything existing around you as it is.

At the end of the day, the only true thing that matters is to love and be loved. When Nora returns home, she “remembers what it is to care and be cared for” and suddenly she reinvents her perspective on what purpose means. Leaving and returning meant that “she had touched the vastness of life and within that vastness, she had seen the possibility not only of what she could do, but also feel” (284). 

There is no perfect life, even in  the most “perfect” life. As Nora experiences in her life with Ash and Molly, something can still feel minutely off, regardless of how ideal it seems. Even if it's just that it is “too perfect,” there will always be some level of discontent, unless you actively rewire your brain against it.  As we learn in The Midnight Library, the choice to live, simply as you are, is often the most powerful choice of all.