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

by Oliver Burkeman

Goldstein counsels, adding that ‘in my experience, generosity never leads to remorse.’

other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems. This is one more area in which the best thing to do, as a finite human with limited control, is usually not to meddle, but to let things be.

‘It’s weird how when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy,’ observes the novelist Leila Sales, poking fun at this tendency in herself, ‘but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.’

this, here and now, is real life. This is it. This portion of your limited time, the part before you’ve managed to get on top of everything, or dealt with your procrastination problem, or graduated or found a partner or retired; and before the survival of democracy or the climate have been secured: this part matters just as much as any other and arguably even more than any other, since the past is gone and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists. If instead you take the other approach – if you see all of this as leading up to some future point when real life will begin, or when you can finally start enjoying yourself, or feeling good about yourself – then you’ll end up treating your actual life as something to ‘get through,’ until one day it’ll be over, without the meaningful part ever having arrived. We have to show up as fully as possible here, in the swim of things as they are.

At some point, in order to experience the benefits of having received any in the first place, you’re going to have to eat a damn marshmallow.

One conclusion that follows from the fact that this is it is that striving towards sanity is never going to work. You have to operate from sanity instead.

In his book Anti-Time Management, Richie Norton boils this philosophy down to two steps. One: ‘Decide who you want to be.’ Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately.’

The signature behavior of the striver-towards-sanity is ‘clearing the decks’: trying to deal with all the minor tasks tugging at your attention in an effort to arrive at the point when you finally expect to have large stretches of time to focus on what you care about. The trouble with clearing the decks, as we’ve seen, is that the supply of things to fill the decks is to all intents and purposes limitless. So a commitment to clearing the decks leads inexorably to a life spent unendingly clearing the decks.

The signature behavior of the operator-from-sanity, by contrast, is what the creativity coach Jessica Abel calls ‘paying yourself first with time’: spending a little time on what matters to you most immediately, instead of waiting, because you understand that even thirty minutes spent Actually Doing the Thing...

you might feel acutely anxious about the uncleared decks you’re ignoring. But the point of operating from sanity is to engage in the behaviors that constitute a meaningful life anyway, and to allow the feelings to follow, rather than spending your life scrambling fruitlessly after the feelings.

Operating from sanity, as I mentioned, can feel awkward at first. Yet beneath the awkwardness, there’s often almost immediately a strange new kind of satisfaction. You feel more engrossed in your experience, and like you’re exerting more influence over the world, even though you’ve achieved that by relaxing rather than intensifying your attempts to feel in control of it. Life certainly doesn’t become problem-free and, what’s more, you’re no longer so confident it ever will. But your problems start to feel more tractable and interesting, and often enough you find you can approach them with relish. This way of being feels less like lying on a beach in the sun and more like striding over hills, with the wind and the rain in your face: not effortless, maybe not even always that pleasant, in a conventional sense; but bracing, invigorating, and vital.

Jack King, an Anglican priest from Tennessee, coined the phrase ‘scruffy hospitality’ in 2014.

Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than in the impression your home or lawn makes.

But King was pointing to something deeper: being willing to let others see your life as it really is can be a positive act of generosity towards them, too.

It’s nice to collect memories, of course, but the way to do that isn’t to go about trying to collect them. It’s living them as fully as possible, so as to remember them vividly later.

nineteenth-century Japanese statesman Ii Naosuke explains: Great attention should be given to a tea gathering, which we can speak of as ‘one time, one meeting’ (ichi-go, ichi-e). Even though the host and guests may see each other often socially, one day’s gathering can never be repeated exactly. Viewed this way, the meeting is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime occasion.

You can have a hundred tea ceremonies; you could even have all of them with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then that stretch of time evaporates forever. If it didn’t – if, in defiance of all logic, it somehow persisted, so that you could return to it whenever you liked, for as long as you liked – it would be vastly less precious. The transience is the whole point.

‘It was said of Rabbi Simcha Bunim that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha’olam – “For my sake the world was created.” On the other he wrote: V’anokhi afar v’aefer – “I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out each slip of paper as necessary, as a reminder to himself.’ – TOBA SPITZER

The truth, as one spiritual teacher puts it, is that reality doesn’t need me to help operate it. It carries on fine regardless. Which is obvious – except that the level of stress we generally attach to our efforts to resolve our little problems would seem to imply otherwise.

(If we could all stand out from the crowd, there’d be no crowd from which to stand out.)

Derrick Jensen, who says: ‘The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done.’

You might easily never have been born, but fate granted you the opportunity to get stuck into the mess you see around you, whatever it is. You are here. This is it. You don’t much matter – yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. The river of time flows inexorably on; amazingly, confoundingly, marvelously, we get the brief chance to go kayaking in it.

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. Instead, you choose to put down that impossible burden – and to keep on putting it down when you realize, as you frequently will, that you’ve inadvertently picked it up again. And so you move forward into life with greater vigor, a more peaceful mind, more openness to others, and, on your better days, the exhilaration that comes from savoring reality’s bracing air.

my superb agents Claire Conrad and Melissa Flashman,

Stuart Williams at The Bodley Head and Eric Chinski at Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

Joan Tollifson approaches the topic from a more eclectic perspective in her wonderfully titled Death: The End of Self-Improvement,

Sheldon Kopp’s delightful book If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!: The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients

Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails.)

Steve Chandler’s Time Warrior

Gregg Krech’s The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology.

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work/Navigating Life by Jim Benson

Paul Loomans’s Time Surfing: The Zen Approach to Keeping Time on Your Side,

Virginia Valian’s essay ‘Learning to Work,’ which she makes available on her website, virginiavalian.org.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.

Dean Rickles’s book Life is Short: An Appropriately Brief Guide to Making It More Meaningful.

John Tarrant, chiefly Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life.