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

On a closely related point: if you’ve found this book in any way inspiring, you may be tempted, at this juncture, to resolve to make a fresh start, to declare that from today – or next week, once you’ve got various urgent business out of the way – you’ll do everything differently forever. This is an urge worth resisting: it’s a perfectionistic atti

But the relationship between the two kinds of ‘impossible’ is actually an inverse one. In other words, the more willing you are wholeheartedly to acknowledge the hard limitations of human finitude, the easier it gets to do what others might dismiss as impossible. Once you stop struggling to get on top of everything, to stay in absolute control, or

‘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

You get to proceed in the splendidly imperfectionist spirit of the eco-philosopher 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.’

Often think of the rapidity with which things pass by and disappear…For substance is like a river in continual flow, and the activities of things are in constant change, and the causes work in infinite varieties; and there is hardly anything which stands still. And consider this which is near to thee, this boundless abyss of the past and of the fut

Yet, as the Zen philosopher 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 it. Our very being is inseparable from our context, or as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we ‘inter-are’; my existence would be wholly impossible wi

Likewise, if you’ve been thinking of making a radical change in your life – travelling the world in midlife, say, or educating your kids outside the school system – there’s a solid chance you can scrabble together the resources and figure out a way. You won’t feel like you know what you’re doing. But nobody ever does; that’s just how it is for fini

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

Among spiritual traditions, 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