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

making concrete, imperfect progress, here and now.

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.

Perfectionists love to begin new endeavors, because the moment of starting belongs to the world of limitlessness:

meditation teacher Susan Piver,

carte blanche

he never asserts that his choice of path ‘made all the difference’ in his life, either. How could he know, since he never got to compare it to the other one?

Or you think of something you’d love to say to a friend with whom you’ve fallen out of touch, but you’re tired right now, and that kind of email deserves doing properly, so you postpone it.

a resonant relationship with life depends on its being semi-controllable, not totally uncontrollable.

the notion that you ‘have to do it’ in truth means that you’ve chosen not to pay the price of refusing; just as the notion that you absolutely can’t do something generally means you’re unwilling to pay the price of doing it.