My rating: 4/5 stars

“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, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’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 kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not 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.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on..”

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

There’s just something about books centred around life and the choices we make that I find so intriguing.

Imagine a library full of books about your life but not just your life as it is now, a library full of all the possible versions of your life you could imagine, even the ones you couldn’t even think to imagine.

Every day we make choices, choices that if made differently in another timeline, would change the entire trajectory of our lives.

In ‘The Midnight Library’, Nora is tired of her life and quite frankly is ready to die. In an attempt to do just that, she somehow ends up at the Midnight Library where she explores infinite versions of her life in the hopes of finding one where she’s genuinely happy. She actually gets to live out her “what if’s”. But she’s surprised to learn that even in the lives where she seems to get the things that she always thought she wanted, there are still regrets.

I think everyone at some point or the other has thought of the what if’s in their lives. What if you stuck with that hobby you were good at when you were younger? What if you moved to that city you wanted to move to? What if things had worked out with that guy or girl? What if, what if, what if. It’s hard not to, because we want to believe we’re making the right choices, the necessary choice, the smart choice. But at some point you’ve got to stop dwelling on what could have been and start focusing on what is.