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

this tendency to turn delightful experiences into stressful ones is rather widespread.

Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.

Steve Jobs, in which the Apple founder urges his audience to search relentlessly for work they love, and never to settle for less, with these words, from the essayist Anne Lamott:

everyone’s imperfect and struggling, and prone to messing things up, as a ‘low anthropology.’ It’s the opposite of a ‘high anthropology,’ in which we focus optimistically on the great things we expect from others and from ourselves

Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than in

‘paying yourself first with time’: spending a little time on what matters to you most immediately,

In his book Anti-Time Management, Richie Norton boils this philosophy down to two steps. One: ‘Decide who you want to be.’ Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately.’

if you treat sanity as a state you have to reach by engaging in all manner of preparations, or getting other things out of the way first, then the main effect will be to reinforce the sense of sanity as something that’s out of reach.

essential sense of groundedness, persisting even through times of difficulty or unpleasantness.