The midnight library

Day 140 / 366

Today I finished reading the book “The Midnight Library”. It had been on my wishlist for a long long time, but I never got around to reading it. I had not read much in the past two months so I wanted an easy yet fulfilling read that could help me get back my reading habit. And I am glad that I picked this book.

If you had the chance to undo your past decisions, thus rewriting your history and changing your life, would you do it? This is the dilemma that Nora, the lead in this book is faced with when she finds herself in a mysterious library when she tries to kill herself. The library is filled with infinite books, each with a possible life for Nora. Will she be able to find a life in which she is happy and does not want to die?

“You don’t have to understand life, you just have to live it.”

I have actually given this a lot of thought, that if I get a time machine, would I go back and change something in my life? There are lots of things I regret, as I am sure all of us do. But you’ve got to remember that our lives are just a series of decisions, both big and small, that eventually lead to us being where we are at present. If you want to get rid of the bad things in life, you might have to part with some of the good things that those decisions lead to as well.

I regret the time I spent in Kota, where I was cut off from all my friends and had no social life for 2 years. All I did was study. I always feel like I missed out on a lot of stuff that everyone else that age went through. I could have joined the gym, learned how to drive a car, stayed in touch with old friends, and made new ones. Life might have been easier now in some regards.

But at the same time, those 2 years led to me getting into IIT Bombay, and so much good that happened in my life after that would have been undone as well. I will not give that up for anything.

Life is not something you can plan. It’s something that just happens to you. However it is, it’s a journey that you get to go through, and it’s up to you what you make of it.

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.