An Ordinary Life
The sky grows dark
The black over blue
Yet the stars still dare
To shine for you
—Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
I am a sucker for any book with “bookshop,” “library,” or “Paris” in the title. I almost never love the book, but I almost always love the idea of the book, and so either way, I leave mostly happy.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig was the rare book which had one of the magic title words, a fantastic idea, and excellent execution. Nora’s life is miserable--her parents are dead; she is estranged from her brother; her job is dead-end; her best friend has moved to Australia; her cat just died. She feels completely alone in the world, and she decides there is nothing left for her.
What she discovers is that between life and death is the Midnight Library, containing books of all the different lives she could have lived if she had made different choices, and for a brief window of time, she is able to dip into these books and experience other possibilities for her life. There were strong It’s a Wonderful Life vibes, but the ending managed to stand on its own and deliver an inspiring picture of all the beauty and love contained in one very ordinary life, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Several years ago, I started actively looking for the beautiful ordinary when I realized that I was anxious all the time, not sleeping well, and always wishing for the day to be over so I could get to something better. I was compartmentalizing scenes--this part is awful, so just suffer through it, and this part is good, but it will be over too fast, so try not to dread the end. It was a stupid cycle, and I was really struggling to break it. The cycle was mostly about control. When I look back now, I know that there was little that was really so terrible, but my fears loomed large because of how much I couldn’t ensure the outcomes.
This book resonated with me because of how each life strips away the clouds for Nora and helps her to see what she really needs for a good life, not what everyone else needs. In my own life, I started making gratitude lists, and keeping lists of positive things that happened even in the difficult times, and I took pictures of and wrote about the lovely, ordinary pieces of my life I had been overlooking while I waited for something better to happen. Slowly, and with the influence of way too many things to list here, my outlook began to change. I’m still not perfect at appreciating the ordinary, but I’m better at releasing the idea that for something to matter--for someone to matter--it has to be big and visible and clearly important. Life is not a competition. There is room for all of us, and there is room for us to be together.
As The Midnight Library says, “We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.”
