Today I bring you two books to add to your reading list (if you haven’t read them already) and a question to contemplate.
Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library is one of the few fiction books that I keep to revisit. The Midnight Library is such a lovely book and raises a poignant question.
“Between life and death there is a library’, she said.’ And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
The book is the story of Nora Seed, whose life has not been going well. She decides that it might be better if she was dead. At the stroke of midnight, on her last day on earth, she finds herself in a library with her old school librarian, Mrs Elm. The books in the library are all the possibilities of the lives she could have lived depending on the choices she makes. Nora gets the chance to undo her regrets and to try on various lives that she might have lived.
“The books on the higher and lower shelves are the lives a little bit further removed. Lives you are still living in one universe or another, but not ones you have been imagining or mourning or thinking about. They are lives you could live but never dreamt of.”
We travel with Nora through her various lives and the discoveries she makes that the lives she has regretted might not have turned out the way she imagined. Some of those regrets turned out to be lucky escapes and some of the dream lives turn out to hold nightmares. Life, it seems, is rather like the games of chess she played with Mrs Elm at school and plays with her now in the Library. Infinite possibilities, no right way to play and it can all get very messy.
At the beginning of The Midnight Library is a quote from Sylvia Plath: “I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.”
I wonder what shades, tones and variations she would have experienced if she had not taken her own life at the age of 30. What choices might Plath have made if she had visited the Midnight Library?
Contemplating the story of The Midnight Library also brought to mind The Dance by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. Her best known book is The Invitation. The Dance picks up where The Invitation left off and takes the ideas deeper. Each chapter begins with a line of the poem and Oriah explores, through her sharing own journey, our ability to open to the adventure of living with all its possibilities, nuances and emotions. You can read The Dance here.
What brought The Dance to mind in relation to The Midnight Library is that in the first chapter, after an difficult discussion with her son, Oriah writes: “With my heart bruised by all three of these of these failures to live my desire to love myself and others well, it becomes painfully obvious to me that the intention to live consistent with soul-felt desires is not enough even when those desires are deeply felt and clearly articulated. I want to know why I am so infrequently the person I really want to be.”
And then, one night after several months of deep writing, trying to find the answer to her question, one of her guides that has appeared in her dreams for many years comes and speaks to her while she sleeps.
“Wrong question, Oriah” she says. “The question is not why are you so infrequently the people you really want to be. The question is why do you so infrequently want to be the people you really are.” She pauses. “Because you have no faith that who you are is enough.” Her voice is soft, full of sadness. “But it is. Your true nature as human beings is compassionate, and this essential nature makes you capable of being intimately and fully present. Who you are really is enough.”
Although not explicitly stated in The Midnight Library, Nora Seed was facing that same dilemma. Depressed by not being the person she wanted to be, full of regrets for the roads not taken, and not able to see that who she was, her simple beingness, was enough. I have felt that same dilemma too. It’s probably a rare person that hasn’t.
Without spoiling the ending of the book, Nora finally comes to accept that she has something to give to the world and she begins to dance with that.
Both The Midnight Library and The Dance are about finding ways to let our essential nature guide our choices and our actions, learning to accept who we are with fierce and compassionate honesty, and accepting that who we are is enough. Because there are infinite choices and possibilities, our guiding star has to be who we are at the essence of our being. Anything else will lead us astray (and regularly does!).
“Tell me a story of who you are,
and see who I am in the stories I am living.
And together we will remember that each of us has a choice.”
from The Dance
Our contemplative question:
If we write our destiny and create our own Midnight Library through the choices that we make, what if our real task was simply to allow our enough-ness to unfold rather than constantly strive for it? How would that shape the choices we make about how to spend today? I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments.
Purchase:
The Midnight Library from Bookshop.org (affiliate link)
The Dance (from Amazon, not an affiliate link)
Building a library of my own
This week I’ve been working on my ideas for The Library of Inspiration for Hungry Souls. Gathering our bones will become part of that library along with a few other elements. More will be revealed on this in the next few weeks. I’ve been inspired by this print my sister gave me of a Bettison’s Library in Margate in the 1800s. The building is no longer there, having been replaced in the 1930s. It amuses me that my family name was associated with a library (even though I haven’t yet found a direct ancestral link).
Inspiration to start your week
I’ve added a new section to Gathering the bones called Sparks, which will become a weekly short post on a Monday to spark inspiration for the week. It might be a quote, a spot of bibliomancy, or something else. I will let my intuition be the guide. Breathe into it and enjoy whatever it brings you. I have given myself a limit of 100 words per post so it will always be a quick read. The first one will land in your inbox on Monday 15 April. The regular weekly Gathering our bones will still be published on a Friday.
Until next time… with love from my soul to yours