“Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
I don’t often crack open a relatively short fiction novel expecting to get an eye-opening, even worldview-changing philosophical life lesson. Yet, to my surprise, The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig, did just that to me.
The plot is appealing, yet fairly basic, and even a bit thin at times. However, the numerous punch-you-in-the face quotes and poignant lessons it contains kept me eagerly turning those pages to the very end. I tried to limit the spoilers here, so if you haven’t read it yet, but plan to, you should be okay to read this first!
In The Midnight Library, mid-thirty something, Nora, experiences a series of events that lead her into a dark depression, prompting her to choose to attempt to end her life. She then finds her spirit in a place somewhere in between life and death with a version of her elementary school librarian who shows her “The Book of Regrets.” This book contains all the regrets Nora has collected over the course of her life, and she is then given the opportunity to visit alternate realities and see how things would have turned out if she had made choices that she regretted not making.
After visiting many different versions of her life, she eventually comes to the understanding that, while all of these lives are very different from each other, they all still contain disappointment, sadness, and varying degrees of suffering, just like her “real” life.
She ultimately realizes that there is no life that can exist without pain; the pain just comes in different forms.
She says, “It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
Personally, I know I’ve had my fair share of “what if's” and have indulged in the “grass is always greener” way of thinking many times. But this story simply demonstrates that regrets are pointless.
No matter what we could have/should have/would have done differently, we still experience times of pain, hurt, stress, suffering. Yet in any life we also have those moments that make life worth living - the moments where we experience overwhelming love, joy, peace.
Learning to let go of regrets means giving ourselves permission to fully experience the present, right now, in this life. We can’t change the past and we can’t predict the future, but we can embrace the present and live our painful, joyful, unpredictable, messy, beautiful lives to the fullest.
The life that matters is the one we are living now.
I’m grateful to have experienced a lot of growth in this area over the last few years, and meditating on the lessons of The Midnight Library has really helped me to focus on this more. I am at a place where I can honestly say I do not regret *most* of the things that at one point or another in my life, I have regretted.
Like Nora, my own near-death experience certainly helped speed this process along - when you're given a second chance at life, gratitude tends to flow a little easier.
I can see more clearly now what past “regrets” have shown me, what they have taught me. To me, living a life without regrets doesn’t mean I have never done or will never do things that are “regret-worthy”, but instead it means that I look for what I can learn from them, I work to forgive myself, I try to move on, and I do better.
Let past regrets teach us, not hold us back. When we know better we can do better (thank you Maya Angelou).
Nora can wrap things up for us today with this -
“Love and laughter and 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 completely 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 a future of multifarious possibility. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever. Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential.
The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.
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.”
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