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

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

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

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

When I fail to take action on things I care about, the reason is sometimes that I lacked the time, or couldn’t summon the willpower. But it’s at least as likely to be because I spooked myself with visions of the perfect result I thought I needed to achieve, or assumptions about the difficulties involved, thereby blocking action that would otherwise

Loomans gives the example of a person whose long-neglected shed, filled with junk, is becoming a source of mounting anxiety and guilt:

Befriending your rats is a gentle strategy, but there’s nothing submissive about it. It’s a pragmatic way to maximise your room for manoeuvre, and your capacity to make progress on the work you care about, by becoming ever more willing to acknowledge that things are as they are, whether you like it or not.

It’s because being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends. It just means that the list of worthwhile things you could in principle do with your time will always be vastly longer than the list of things for which you’ll have time. It just means you’ll always be vulnerable

‘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

Many people these days report the feeling that they begin each morning in a kind of ‘productivity debt,’ which they must struggle to pay off over the course of the day, in hopes of returning to a zero balance by the time evening comes. If they fail – or worse, don’t even try – it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the plane