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February 14 - March 5, 2025
After all, as we’ll see, one main tenet of imperfectionism is that the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be ‘out of the way,’ so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now.
‘What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.’ – EUGENE GENDLIN
Sasha Chapin refers to as ‘playing in the ruins.’ In his twenties, Chapin recalls, his definition of a successful life was that he should become a celebrated novelist, on a par with David Foster Wallace. When that didn’t happen – when his perfectionistic fantasies ran up against his real-world limitations – he found it unexpectedly liberating. The failure he’d told himself he couldn’t possibly allow to occur had, in fact, occurred, and it hadn’t destroyed him. Now he was free to be the writer he actually could be. When this sort of confrontation with limitation takes place, Chapin writes, ‘a
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By contrast, actually doing one meaningful thing today – just sitting down to meditate, just writing a few paragraphs of the novel, just giving your full attention to one exchange with your child – requires surrendering a sense of control. It means not knowing in advance if you’ll carry it off well (you can be certain you’ll do it imperfectly), or whether you’ll end up becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing all the time.
A friend of mine was trying to decide whether to leave his marriage. Through neither partner’s fault, it was clearly headed nowhere good, but he felt paralyzed by two equally appalling options. To walk away would mean causing anguish to his wife, and scandalizing his traditionalist family; but to grit his teeth and stay would be to condemn both of them to decades of misery, or force his wife to do the leaving. As it’s all too easy to do in such dilemmas, he’d subconsciously concluded that if a given option wouldn’t be painless – and it was clear that neither option would be – it must therefore
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He saw that he could acknowledge that leaving would be terrible, yet that if it mattered to him enough, he was free to do it anyway, and to deal as responsibly as he could with the resulting awfulness as the price he was willing to pay. Facing this truth – that the choice would come with costs, and that he could elect to shoulder them – gave him the psychological room for maneuver he’d been missing. He left. It was awful. But life moved on.
The truth, though it often makes people indignant to hear it, is that it’s almost never literally the case that you have to meet a work deadline, honor a commitment, answer an email, fulfill a family obligation, or anything else. The astounding reality – in the words of Sheldon B. Kopp, a genial and brilliant American psychotherapist who died in 1999 – is that you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.
Unless you’re literally being physically coerced into doing something, the notion that you ‘have to do it’ in truth means that you’ve chosen not to pay the price of refusing; just as the notion that you absolutely can’t do something generally means you’re unwilling to pay the price of doing it.
The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.
the temptation is often to exaggerate potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves the burden of making a bold choice.
‘One never notices what has been done; one can see only what remains to be done.’ – MARIE CURIE
you belong to the gloomy bunch psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers,’ which is a diplomatic way of saying that our accomplishments, impressive as they may sometimes be, are driven ultimately by feelings of inadequacy.
‘done list,’ which you use to create a record not of the tasks you plan to carry out, but of the ones you’ve completed so far today – which makes it the rare kind of list that’s actually supposed to get longer as the day goes on.
treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.
Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow. ‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.’
consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else. It’s not merely that a fixation on retaining facts is a poor way to reap the benefits of reading. It’s also that any focus on ‘reaping the benefits’ risks obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now.
It used to be said about certain horrifying news events that ‘if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.’ But that’s a relic of a time when people had attention to spare, and when it wasn’t in the vested interests of media outlets to stoke as much outrage as possible. In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.
embracing your limitations isn’t a matter of settling for less in life. It’s not about passively sitting back and letting things happen to you.
