pick your battles, and don’t feel bad about doing so. By embracing your limitations in this way, you’ll be in a position to do more to fight the battles you do pick, and also thereby to feel better about yourself, than the person who tries to care about everything.

Almost nobody wants to hear the real answer to the question of how to spend more of your finite time doing things that matter to you, which involves no system. The answer is: you just do them. You pick something you genuinely care about, and then, for at least a few minutes – a quarter of an hour, say – you do some of it. Today.

‘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

introduction. In his magnum opus Resonance, and a follow-up work, The Uncontrollability of the World, Rosa shows how all kinds of disparate human endeavors fit together when understood as attempts to do that very thing. The quest to dominate nature; progress in medicine; the growth of military power;

What the stress really signaled, I saw, was that I cared about the project, which is entirely different from saying that it needed to be complex or effortful.

The natural state of the mind is often for it to bounce gently around, usually remaining only loosely focused and receptive to new stimuli, the state sometimes known as ‘open awareness,’ which neuroscientific research has shown is associated with incubating creativity. There are sound evolutionary reasons why this should be the case: the

This way of being feels less like lying on a beach in the sun and more like striding over hills, with the wind and the rain in your face: not effortless, maybe not even always that pleasant, in a conventional sense; but bracing, invigorating, and vital.

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

Where could you take useful action on an important project, today, despite not really knowing how to proceed on it beyond that initial step? What issue in your life could you patch up – what relationship could you mend, what behavior could you alter – without fully grasping what went wrong in the first place? (Some people spend their whole lives