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

Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs – because there will always be trade-offs – and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.

It was a central insight of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that there’s a secret comfort in telling yourself you’ve got no options, because it’s easier to wallow in the ‘bad faith’ of believing yourself trapped than to face the dizzying responsibilities of your freedom.

The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.

Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice – that’s never an option – but of realizing, as Kopp points out, that nothing stops you doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs.

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

develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine.

The essential trouble, as Rosa tells it, is that the driving force of modern life is the fatally misguided idea that reality can and should be made ever more controllable – and that peace of mind and prosperity lie in bringing it ever more fully under our control.

The more you organize your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems – and even if they don’t, the longer you fail to confront them, the more unhappy time you spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places you don’t want to go. It’s ironic that this is known, in

Steve Chandler writes. They don’t see ‘that leaving things unfinished is what’s causing the low levels of energy.’ (He suggests spending one day robotically completing as much unfinished business as you can: ‘Notice at the end of that day how much energy you’ve got. You’ll be amazed.’)