Meditations for Mortals

After all, if you’re hopelessly trapped in the present, it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment – that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can. Now and then, to be sure, the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the fut

If you’re a ‘knowledge worker’ – that is, if you spend your days doing things with computers and words and ideas, as opposed to, say, building houses out of bricks – then you’ll make the most progress, and cover the most ground, if you limit yourself to about three or four hours of intense mental focus each day.

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realise you’re never going to sort your life out.

‘It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don’t know what’s coming is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection.’ – ANN PATCHETT

Yet the truth is that completion replenishes energy, rather than using it up.

Besides, it’s always the same list: nurture your relationships, pursue challenging goals, spend time in nature, and make room for fun. You knew that already. If following a list was all it took, we’d have solved the challenge of human happiness long ago.

Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future – though it might do that too – but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.

A much better rule – indeed, one I think more accurately reflects Seinfeld’s approach to his work – is to do things dailyish.

a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. If you only have fifty pounds in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of pounds’ worth of movie-making equipment