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

it has nothing to do with the quality of the result. Eight hundred words per day; one hour on the side business every evening; five potential customers contacted; three pages of the material for the examination turned into flashcards (or the three-hour rule we encountered on Day Thirteen): these are goals anyone with the available time can achieve,

The Canadian writer David Cain envisions a different way of doing things: Imagine if all the available ‘public concern’ for a given issue could be collected in a huge rain barrel…and redistributed among fewer people. Instead of having 50 million people care seriously about an issue for all of six hours, you could distill that 300 million hours of p

The true insight of Frost’s poem, on this interpretation, isn’t that you should opt for an unconventional life. It’s that the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you’re inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can’t ever know in advance what the best cho

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger described this state of affairs using the word Geworfenheit, or ‘thrownness,’ a suitably awkward word for an awkward predicament: merely to come into existence is to find oneself thrown into a time and place you didn’t choose, with a personality you didn’t pick, and with your time flowing away beneath you, mi

Something you do not solely to become a better sort of person – though it may have that effect, too – but because whatever you’re bringing into reality, right here on the rapids, is worth bringing into reality for itself.

‘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 great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.’ – C. S. LEWIS

‘People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be.’ – IDRIES SHAH

with the future when it does eventually arrive. As the celebrated Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius reassures readers of his Meditations: ‘Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.’

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.