The book
What if the life you’re living isn’t the only life available to you?
The Alternative Is Unthinkable
Other ways to understand your life and what might be possible
Mark Eve
For years the phrase meant one thing to me: keep going when the obvious answer was no. Later I noticed it works the other way round as well. The conviction that keeps you going can also close a door quietly, and whatever you have decided is unthinkable may be the thing worth looking at.
The book is about the questions people carry and rarely get asked. What enough looks like. What a decision is really costing. What you have stopped allowing yourself to want. What is actually true, and what has become true only because you have repeated it for long enough.
It is written from meeting people rather than from a theory of how a life should go. It does not end with a plan you are supposed to follow.
The book explores the thinking. TAIU gives you somewhere to use it. Neither needs the other.
The digital edition is the first edition of the book, published by TAIU and read here in your account. There is no print edition.
Checking your book access…
What is in it
What if there were another way?
Five parts, twenty six chapters and a prologue. The middle of the book is where the Tree arrives, which is the same way of looking that My Tree is built on.
Part one. The life you arrived in
Where a definition of success came from, and how much of a life was decided before anybody thought to check.
- Who told you this was success?
- The life you inherited
- The person you became
- What is actually true?
Part two. The life you are living
The part that is already good, the part making the most noise and the question of what enough looks like.
- The good bit
- The branch in front of you
- Enough
- Your dictionary
- Other people's definitions
- What are you protecting?
Part three. See the whole tree
One life seen at once. Roots, branches, weather, seasons and what growth actually is when it happens.
- Before the tree
- The tree
- Other people's trees
- Weather
- Seasons
- Damage, pruning and recovery
- New growth
Part four. The alternative
What we quietly rule out, what it would cost and how a person chooses anything without being certain.
- The things we make unthinkable
- What if there were another way?
- The alternative you don't like
- The cost of a different life
- Choice without certainty
Part five. The life that's left
What remains, what is handed on and the possibility that you would choose the same life again.
- What will be left?
- The life you are handing on
- This is good
- The alternative is unthinkable
The edition
Read it here, on whatever you have with you
One payment. Permanent access in your TAIU account, readable on a phone, a tablet or a computer. Text size, line spacing and a light, warm or dark page are yours to set, and the book reopens where you left it.
The book explores the thinking. TAIU gives you somewhere to use it. Neither needs the other.
- Edition
- 1.0
- Language
- British English
- Chapters
- 27
- Price
- £7.99, one payment
This is the digital edition, published by TAIU and read here. There is no print edition yet and no date has been set for one.
What you get
- The complete book: five parts, a prologue and twenty six chapters.
- A page based reader on a phone, a tablet or a computer.
- Listen to any chapter read aloud on your own device.
- Highlights, private notes and a For later shelf of what you keep.
- Your place saved, so it reopens where you stopped.
- Permanent access in your account. One payment, no subscription.
Read a sample
These parts of the book are open to anybody. No account, no payment and no email address.