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

to help them see how totally irredeemable their situation is, thereby giving them permission to stop struggling.

solutions, only trade-offs.

head.

There is a] strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that, but whether it is [a relationship with] a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about … The one thing dreaded throughout by such

Certainly, it was clear that achieving wealth or status didn’t cause the problem to go away – which makes sense, since in the modern world, external success is often the result of being even more enmeshed in the desperate game of catch-up than everyone else. ‘Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘

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

many ‘insecure overachievers’ start off as children raised to feel noticed and valued only when they’re excelling at things. Oh, and you can also blame consumerism, which has an obvious vested interest in keeping people feeling inadequate, so they might be relied upon to purchase goods and services that promise to make the feelings go away.

go for a walk with a notebook, list the points that seem most compelling to me, put them in a sensible order, then practice a few times, enough to get a feel for the talk but not enough to render it stilted or rote.

The second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge. At least where non-fiction sources are concerned, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get t

It’s not a given, at any moment, that we’ll even be able to understand what’s happening, or what a reasonable response to it