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

‘Beyond the mountains, more mountains.’ – HAITIAN PROVERB

The truth, though it often makes people indignant to hear it, is that it’s almost never literally the case that you have to meet a work deadline, honor a commitment, answer an email, fulfill a family obligation, or anything else. The astounding reality – in the words of Sheldon B. Kopp, a genial and brilliant American psychotherapist who died in 19

Some tasks are legitimately time-sensitive, of course; but the unpleasant anxiety that attaches itself to tasks we’ve deemed ‘urgent’ is often a sign that someone else’s priorities are in control. The

Something inside unclenches. It’s equivalent to that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin. Very well, then: this is how things are.

if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’ll probably have to do it in a state of feeling unprepared.

But when Rosa reaches for the perfect adjective to describe this feeling of both acting on the world and being acted on by it, engaging with it boldly yet never knowing how it will respond – and the feelings of warmth and fulfillment that result – the term he chooses is anschmiegsamen. What anschmiegsamen means in English – and this is the word tha

Treating what you do with your time as a sequence of tiny completions means falling into line with how things really are. ‘Work is done, then forgotten,’ says the Tao Te Ching. ‘Therefore it lasts forever.’ You’re no longer fighting the current, but letting it carry you forward. Life is less effort that way.

It is never the case that there’s no next step to take. On some level, I think we always already know when we’re hiding out in some domain of life, flinching from a challenge reality has placed before us. The purpose of a question like ‘What’s the life task here?’ is just to haul that knowledge up into the daylight of consciousness, where we can fi

The unfortunate consequence is that we experience our ordinary problems – the bills to pay, the minor conflicts to resolve, each little impediment that stands between us and realizing our goals – as doubly problematic. First, there’s the problem itself. But then there’s the way in which the very existence of any such problems undermines our yearnin

‘Going was dying, and staying was dying. When we get to junctures like that, we had better choose the dying that enlarges rather than the one that keeps us stuck.’ – JAMES HOLLIS