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

by Oliver Burkeman

There are no guarantees – except the guarantee that holding back from life instead is a recipe for anguish.

This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.

Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future – though it might do that too – but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.

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.

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.

The less I’m trying to get something out of an experience, the more I find I can get into it,