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

But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes. I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique

And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.

The late British Zen master Hōun Jiyu-Kennett, born Peggy Kennett, had a vivid way of capturing the sense of inner release that can come from grasping just how intractable our human limitations really are. Her teaching style, she liked to say, was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.

the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead – and work with th

Because our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn’t yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophob