Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

by Oliver Burkeman

ask themselves: How would you like to spend your time today?

Taken at face value, the news that somebody is upset because you’re not behaving as they wanted you to behave is just that: a report on the state of their emotional weather.

What brings fulfillment is being in a certain form of reciprocal relationship with the rest of the world, including other people; you might liken it to a dance in which you alternatingly lead and follow. Whereas a relationship in which you unquestionably have the upper hand at all times is no relationship at all. On a

Sometimes because it leads to good writing or creative solutions, and at other times because it reminds me that when my output falls wildly short of my standards – when the writing’s no good, or no creative solution presents itself – the world never actually seems to collapse.

Suppose it’s 4.10 p.m., on a day when it’s not my turn for school pickup, and I’m focusing hard in my office at home when my son bursts in, to tell me excitedly of his preparations for the school play. A small moment of connection, the kind of thing life’s supposed to be about – except that if my time-boxing plan deems 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. an hour for deep focus, then his entrance is suddenly an intrusion, one more minor way in which my day has gone wrong. Had I spent the five minutes prior to 4 p.m. doing a focus meditation, entering a state of mental quiet in preparation for my hour of concentration, his arrival would be still more jarring and unwelcome.

On a larger scale, you can fall into the trap of viewing your whole life this way, interpreting all the things you’re actually doing with your days as one extended series of interruptions or distractions from what you think you’re meant to be doing with them. Of course you might legitimately dislike certain aspects of your job, or your life. But going through the world with the default belief that it’s full of people or things that need holding at bay is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes ever more people and things feel like they must indeed be held at bay, if you’re ever to get a moment to hear yourself think.

That is: once your focus has already been diverted – once the child has burst into the room, or the anxious thought about the timing of your doctor’s appointment has pulled you away from the novel you were reading – don’t fight the fact.

This allows her to experience what Keynes called ‘a spurious and delusive immortality,’ following the cock-eyed logic that if the point of your life is coming later, it must be the case that you’ll still be alive to experience it – so that as long as you continue investing in your future, maybe you won’t have to die.

On the other hand, there’s no virtue in accumulating the greatest number of uneaten marshmallows that would be delicious were you ever to let yourself consume one.

As an imperfectionist, you don’t have to pretend this situation is without its poignancy, its seasons of grief, its spells of loneliness, confusion or despair. But you no longer fight as hard as you once did to persuade yourself this isn’t the way things are, or that human existence ought to be otherwise.