Perspective & Appreciation | The Midnight Library

Featured Track: Haimin - Mistakes

Appreciation is essential for a life well lived. With all its flaws, inequities, and hardships, appreciation and perspective can literally save a life as well as make a life worth living. Regardless of how troubled, dull, or unfair our life may seem, it often comes down to perspective. What may seem like an ideal life from the outside, may in fact be misery in disguise. In contrast, what may seem like an underwhelming or a painful existence may in fact hide some of the best aspects of living one could ever imagine.

Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library is an incredible work of fiction that magnificently takes readers on journeys of alternative life possibilities derived from differences in decisions. Living in these alternative lives not only explains the importance of appreciation and perspective but more profoundly shows its importance. Through the eyes and lives of Nora Seed, we’re reminded of so many constructs that life can bring if we open our eyes to see the forest for the trees. One later section of the book does an exceptional job encapsulating these messages far better than I may be able to do. Below is an excerpt from that section:

“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...

It takes no effort to miss the friends we don’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 kaleidoscope version of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret and keep regretting, ad infinium 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...

Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of whatever 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 try every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine.

Love and laughter, as well as fear and pain are universal currencies.

We just have to close our eyes and savor the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as complete 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 future of multifarious possibility.

So, lets’ be kind to the people in our own existence…

Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression. No

But do I want to live.

Yes, yes - A thousand times, yes.”  

– Matt Haig, A Thing I Have Learned (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)

We all have bouts where we may have doubts in some area(s) of our life. This book and its underlying messages can really resonate with people of all walks of life. Its overall takeaways provide insights that anyone can glean from in any phase of life.

Embrace the life we choose to lead for we can quite literally be and do anything we want. We simply must remember to appreciate everything, big and small.