My Midnight Library

I recently read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library and I can’t stop thinking about the concept of life’s possibilities and roads not taken. In this illuminating novel, the main character, Nora, wants to end her life, and in fact tries by taking pills. However, she ends up in this theoretical place in her mind called the Midnight Library. In it, she sees a librarian she loved from her childhood, and this woman explains to her that the rows and rows books on the shelves in this “library” are all different versions of how her life could have played out, had she made a different choice along the way. Further, she could pick out a book and enter into the “life” to see if it would have made her happy. This story, also weaves in the idea of parallel universes proposed by theoretical physicists and the possibility that, at any moment there are infinite versions of you living simultaneous lives in different planes of existence.

Wow, a lot to ponder, right? Although most people have at least considered the idea that their lives could be totally different if they chose another adventure.

I often travel on this train of thought: that a series of small choices determines the outcome of each day. And a collection of large and small choices, both conscious and unconscious, shapes a life. Each of us has within us, a countless number of options for how life could end up; yet most let our immediate surroundings and circumstances dictate the possibilities.

It is highly entertaining, and human, to think about ourselves living a different life but the temptation to romanticize is strong.

In another life, I am a field biologist. I took my love of animals and affinity for high school biology classes and ran with it. My fascination and intellect lands me a career where I travel and study the nesting habits of endangered birds or the internal compass of migrating monarch butterflies. I have little in the way of material belongings or close ties with family. I am an explorer, and an observer. A recorder of information and a servant to creatures who need my help to survive.

In another life, I am a best-selling author. I picked the tender shoots of my writing career in college and transplanted and nurtured them, refusing to let them wither. I graduate with my MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and choose writing over all else. I dive into my love of the short story and magical realism and I swim in the success of notoriety and acclaim. I am a wordsmith, a weaver of silken tales spinning the contents of the human heart into garments of warmth and light.

In another life, I own a nursery. I spend my days walking the aisles of spacious, humid greenhouses both my own and those of other plant suppliers that contribute to my collection. Spiny cacti with startlingly vibrant flowers. Faithful succulents in shades of lavender and sage. Shade-loving camellias, azaleas and hydrangeas in flame reds and periwinkle blues. I am a nurturer of beauty, a collector of flora, a distributor of delights from the soil.

In another life I attend a different college (one I was accepted to but didn’t try–Pepperdine, or U.C. Berkeley). I major in art history instead of making it my minor. I spend my days on a sunny beach in Southern California, or in the eclectic melting pot that is the San Francisco Bay Area. I meet other people and marry someone different. Maybe we raise our kids abroad. Other cultures, and settings and flavors. I am an explorer of otherness, an expander of my own horizons, a student of the new experiences.

In each of these lives, and all the others, I still carry my own baggage. I face my own struggles because I am, after all, still me. I still come from the same two people and inherit the same strengths and weaknesses, talents and defects. In some lives I don’t find my way to alcohol and become ensnared in its talons. In others I’m not able to overcome. Always, there’s a yearning though. A need to feel filled, and fulfilled. That need is a human need, buried deep in our DNA. And how we fill it is also a choice, another way, another life.

In The Midnight Library, Nora spends a lot of her time looking for the “right life,” the one that will make her happy, and most importantly, one where she is not filled with regrets. But she finds that these regrets, this baggage, the struggle, is still present in some form, whatever life she is living. And that the only thing we can truly change is our outlook. We don’t need to find happiness. We need a different view. As she puts it, “It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”

So in this life I’ve built out of choices, good and bad, I am caretaker to a precious family, teacher of ideas, and encourager to those I meet along the way. It’s not a perfect life, but it’s the one I’ve chosen, and I can choose to focus on the regrets or the possibilities. What have I done, or What can I do?

I prefer to think like poet Mary Oliver about what it is I plan to do with my “one wild and precious life.”

I hope you do too.