Really, though, showing up more fully in the present is about how you pursue your plans for the future; it certainly doesn’t require that you abandon them.

‘There is a strike in Shanghai,’ Weil responds, eyes brimming with tears, ‘and troops fired on the workers!’

The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts.

The truth, as one spiritual teacher puts it, is that reality doesn’t need me to help operate it. It carries on fine regardless.

‘The driving cultural force of that form of life we call “modern” is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable,’

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.’

One of the main reasons we fail to treat other people’s emotions in this clear-headed way is that they sail under the flag of ‘urgency.’

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.

this same inverse relationship between control and gratification crops up across the whole of a life.