‘You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.’ – SHELDON B. KOPP

The main point – though it took me years to realize it – is to 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.

(‘Our suffering,’ as Mel Weitsman, another Zen teacher, puts it, ‘is believing there’s a way out.’)

You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is.

‘What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.’ – EUGENE GENDLIN

When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count. When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them. And when you stop making

Rather than fueling the fantasy of one day bringing everything under control, this book takes it as a given that you’ll never get on top of everything. It starts from the position that you’ll never feel fully confident about the future, or fully understand what makes other people tick – and that there will always be too much to do.

The greatest achievements often involve remaining open to serendipity, seizing unplanned opportunities, or riding unexpected bursts of motivation. To be delighted by another person, or moved by a landscape or a work of art, requires not being in full control. At the same time, a good life clearly isn’t about giving up all hope of influencing

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. And so we experience the world as an endless series of things we must master, learn,