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March 16 - May 20, 2023
Helena Bonham Carter, everything in life is art: “What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.”
Balance is not only elusive, it might also be a rather unsatisfying life goal. When we are balanced, we are stationary, resisting any change, holding our breath as we try to stay still.
Life is movement, not stagnant balance. Enjoy the slice of leftover cake, enjoy the moments by yourself, enjoy the squeeze, enjoy the absorbing, and enjoy the soup and the biscuits. Be all and everything, or all or nothing. Enjoy whatever is your particular way of wobbling through your days, and learn to value the variety.
When we feel settled, we can find space, clarity, and focus.
This isn’t to say we should settle for less. Rather, we should appreciate that there is meaning to be found in the settling, in arriving at a decision and giving ourselves the opportunity to become comfortable with it.
We don’t know who we will become tomorrow because we don’t know where today’s decisions will lead us. Nevertheless, each decision we make can refresh our days with change. That’s part of the joy of living—to pave the path as we walk and encounter the person we will become as we go. So don’t doubt your decisions, and don’t worry about getting them right every time—because even the wrong ones can turn out to be right.
Instead of pinning our great hopes onto tomorrow, we can be okay with holding our disappointments in our days: we can find ways to live with them, and maybe we’ll find something great within them, too. We can ask what we want from this day rather than be directed by what we expect the day should be.
A plan is an attempt to write a future so it feels more certain, more ideal, more productive, more pleasant, but it’s often in vain.
We cannot rid our futures of uncertainty, but we can loosen our grip on our desire for certainty. We can change our great expectations of our future self and relieve some of the pressure.
There’s a power in the word yet—perhaps we didn’t yet do the thing, and yet we still can.
Rather than dismissing the days that didn’t meet our expectations, perhaps it’s the unrealistic shoulds and the onerous obligations that we need to strike.
Our lists of shoulds are of our own making—and so is our subsequent misery.
busy is not the same as productive, and productive is not the same as worthwhile.
If we have internalized the idea that we should be busy all the time, or see no escape from the busyness of daily life, how do we find any reprieve from the consequent burnout? It’s tempting to turn to a productivity hack or a new system to organize our lives, but these are like Band-Aids if we don’t address our collective resistance to what we need most: rest.
We’ve become accustomed to ignoring our need for rest so we can stay on top of things. We’ve divorced ourselves from what our bodies require—we feel we have to justify our tiredness, or check our to-do lists to see if we’ve done enough or can squeeze more in, placing that above the call of our bodies.
Perhaps we resist rest not because we can’t find the time, but because we fear the boredom that can accompany doing nothing.
Part of the challenge of working less is that we’re entrenched in a system that demands more and more, but it might also be true that we’ve been taught to resist rest. Even the weekend has fallen victim to our need to avoid rest—when
Maybe it’s worth inspecting why we’ve given laziness negative connotations and what circumstances, situations, or ideas lie beneath our judgments of it. Are we really being lazy, or have we internalized the idea that we should be working all the time?
Slowing down to rest isn’t a moral failing—it’s essential to help us recharge and reflect.
We can determine the rest we need by looking at where we are using most of our energy in the day. Perhaps rest for you is getting more sleep. Or maybe it is walking in nature, a morning of solitude, playing an instrument, or watching the clouds pass by.
Giving yourself permission to rest in the way you need it can be the very thing that allows you to discover more opportunities to shape your day rather than having busyness shape it for you.
When we resist hitting the reset button, things can begin to deteriorate, including ourselves.
Stopping can bring clarity, but it can also bring pleasure.
Society and the environment might be better off if there were more of us producing less and consuming less.
there are limits to what can be done in a day. When we greet each day, we are greeting its limitation—the limited hours in a working day, our limited free time, our limited energy and resources. Yet we can often place expectations on ourselves and our days as if these limitations don’t exist—we can set sky-high ambitions, take on countless responsibilities, and make plans upon plans. When the things we need or ought to do keep spilling over into tomorrow, we may turn to optimizing our days—if we adopt a new time-management technique, we think, we’ll finally get on top of things. But the
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Limitations make life worth living.
“Once we recognize that there is no way to optimize ourselves into being perfect, hyper-productive beings,” he said, “we can actually get on with spending our limited time and using our limited resources for what matters to us most.”
It reminds us that our days are finite and, therefore, precious.
In learning to say no to certain things, we create space for saying yes to more fitting things.
Overlooking our limitations is a recipe for feeling overwhelmed. We can easily create limitless to-do lists, fooling ourselves into thinking we are juggling multiple things successfully, when in fact we aren’t attending to anything well.
it’s much better to work with our limitations than against them.
if there were no box, we couldn’t think outside it, or know when to push against it.
When we feel caught in the minutiae of our daily lives, or our lives feel like they’re submerged in pointlessness, sometimes we need to consider the limitlessness of life rather than its limits.
The ache of our limitations can subside when we look for awe and wonder in the world around us.
we’re just one small person, nestled in something vast.
What we do in this life, and the moments we seize, might not matter one iota, but they matter wholly because, at the end of the limited day, they are all we have. Life is finite, and yet many of us go on living day after day, not giving attention to the things that are most important to us or marveling at the awe of it all. We forget to take care of our heart and bring our heart to the day. We forget we have but one opportunity to use it.
we don’t need more rules or more self-discipline to get things done—we need to make things more delightful so that we actually enjoy doing them.
motivation isn’t something we find, it’s something we cultivate.
“motivation trap”: despite the common belief, motivation does not precede action; action precedes motivation.
we are more likely to take action if we are interested in something, so we must first find t...
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remember to put joy ahead of duty.
Where did all the joy go? It disappears amid the regulations we set up and our focus on the outcome.
Starting with delight is about finding what intrinsically motivates us instead of being derailed by extrinsic measures.
We don’t need to add another layer of dread to things by setting up rules and milestones.
Sometimes what looks like the more effortful or punishing option is actually more satisfying—more delightful—because it requires that we engage with a challenge.
if we start our day with the most delightful thing, it might have a ripple effect on our mood as the day unfolds.
getting up early to “eat the frog” might seem like a wise choice, but when the alarm sounds, it’s not necessarily going to motivate us to get out of bed because the reward suddenly isn’t as appealing. But if something delightful is waiting for us, it may be the very thing to coax us out.
scatter delight through our days.
The important thing is to be alive to the flavors of the day rather than dread the day.
The pull of distraction has become synonymous with our devices, but we have long been susceptible to it.
