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

by Oliver Burkeman

mantra: ‘I choose to live in Easy World, where everything is easy.’ When

because it functions not as a mystical command to the universe but as a reminder to yourself not to fall into the old habit of adding complications or feelings of unpleasant exertion where neither need exist.

making things harder than they need to be, which is a lack of self-compassion.

‘reverse golden rule’ – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else.

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

‘Everybody loves something. Even if it’s just tortillas.’

Chögyam Trungpa’s point is that this isn’t necessary: you needn’t try to transform yourself into someone who feels more love for humanity, and it’s probably impossible anyway. You just need to find where you already feel warmth or tenderness, then go from there.

Being a better or more loving person is another thing you can’t make happen. You

it’s far more likely that you have all sorts of generous thoughts and impulses, all the time, and that your problem – if you’re anything like me – is that you repeatedly fail to do very much about them. Or to be more precise: you inadvertently erect obstacles to action. A homeless person asks you for money, and

and that I seek to follow myself, which is to act on a generous impulse the moment it arises. The point isn’t to try to render yourself

Far better to locate the generosity that’s already inside you, then be sure not to get in its way.

It’s possible I’ve given the impression, so far, that the lack of control you have over how reality unfolds is just one of those unfortunate truths to which you’d better resign yourself. But it’s more than that. In some profound way, it’s a good thing. Not being able to guarantee that your plans will come off; not knowing what the future holds; never quite feeling like you’ve got things figured out, or that you’re on top of things – all of these are mysteriously central to what

Almost everything that happens, according to an adage of uncertain origin, is either a good time or a good story. Either things go right, or they go wrong; and surprisingly often when they do go wrong – although of course not invariably – life ends up unaccountably better as a result.

And yet despite the strange benefits that so often seem to arise from our lack of control, we proceed through life – as individuals, but as societies, too – as if the supreme goal should be always and only to obtain more and more

our desire for controllability backfires, undermining our efforts to build happy and fulfilling lives.

the interruptions are precisely one’s real life

implies that you always know, in advance, the best way for any portion of your time to unfold – and that should reality beg to differ, it must always be reality that’s wrong.

But the truth is that fixity of attention isn’t our baseline. The natural state of the mind is often for it to bounce gently around, usually remaining

‘Getting lost and distracted in this way is what life is for,’ Tarrant

Buddhism is uniquely insightful when it comes to this specific form of suffering – how we make ourselves more miserable than necessary, not just by railing against negative experiences we’re having, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold on to good things that are happening exactly as we wanted them to.

‘Perhaps all anxiety,’ writes Sarah Manguso, ‘might derive from a fixation on moments – an inability to accept life as

ongoing.’

The transience is the whole point.

mono no aware, a wistful pathos at the transience of things,

real wisdom doesn’t lie in getting life figured out. It lies in grasping the sense in which you never will get it completely figured out.

What if ‘getting a handle on things’ in this way wasn’t always necessary, though? What if, in fact, it was an obstacle to a fuller experience of life? The medieval comparison

joy, if it’s ever to be found at all, is going to have to be found now, in the midst of the confusion and precariousness?

how it’s often wisest to get out of the way and let reality happen; and what’s involved in showing up, as fully as possible, for a limited human life.

Alan Watts liked to point out, it makes just as much sense to say that we come out of the world: that in the same way a tree blossoms, the universe ‘peoples.’ We are expressions of

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.’

and then ask yourself what it feels like to imagine that some version of it might dog you to the end of your days. What if I’ll always have anxious reactions – the clench in the stomach, the sharp intake of breath – to minor events that don’t warrant them? My first response is to feel crestfallen; but soon thereafter comes relief.