more fully accepting that you are who you are, and where you are, might change a lot, by permitting you to abandon the dream of a fresh start and actually do one thing today that truly matters, and that makes life resonate once more.

You are here. This is it. You don’t much matter – yet you matter as much as anyone ever did.

eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen, who says: ‘The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done.’

pour yourself into tasks that matter for no other reason than that nothing could be more enlivening, or more true to the situation in which you find yourself.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of our finitude is the fact that we are irrevocably of the world, whether we like it or not. If so, then maybe our responsibility isn’t to get our arms around it, nor to justify ourselves before it, but to embody as completely as possible the momentary expression of it that we are.

sometimes you just know you’re doing something that matters.

The first is that it simply need not follow, from our cosmic insignificance as individuals, that our actions don’t matter. The idea that things only count if they count on the vastest scale is one more expression of our discomfort with finitude: accepting that they might count only transiently, or locally, requires us to face our limitations and

reality doesn’t need me to help operate it. It carries on fine regardless.

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius recommends a mental exercise we might today call ‘zooming out’: whenever you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed – or, alternatively, too full of yourself – try expanding your awareness of reality from your small patch of ground to the world as a whole. This will put things in perspective. Even more powerfully,