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

What if this might be a lot easier than I’d been assuming?

Because our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn’t yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophob

nurture your relationships, pursue challenging goals, spend time in nature, and make room for fun.

there are no

Social psychologists describe what’s going on here using the language of ‘construal level theory,’ which refers to the way we conceive of objects and events as if from different mental altitudes. The classic example concerns summer vacations. Consider how you’d like to spend yours next year, and you’re likely to picture it, figuratively speaking, f

‘choosing,’ which he contrasts with the similar-sounding but actually very different activities of ‘trying to decide,’

the man who works so moderately, as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work.

fleetingness is understood not as a threat to what’s unfolding, but as the source of its value.

You might get all sorts of useful things done – but they’ll never bring peace of mind, because you’ll effectively be telling yourself on a daily basis that peace of mind is something distant and not available right here.