La Bibliothèque de minuit

But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths.

It was, she decided, a very good time to die.

No one needed her. She was superfluous to the universe.

A National Geographic was on display.
As she stared now at the magazine cover - an image of a black hole - she realised that's what she was. A black hole. A dying star, collapsing on itself.

'I'm happy here.'
'Except you aren't.'

You don't have to understand life. You juste have to live it.

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 the people 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 only way to learn is to live.

Too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement - an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary.