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

for finite humans, life certainly is a tough challenge: you’ve got severely limited time, and limited control, necessitating hard choices and a tolerance for imperfection and uncertainty.

The main point – though it took me years to realise it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine.

Facing this truth – that the choice would come with costs, and that he could elect to shoulder them – gave him the psychological room for manoeuvre he’d been missing.

Resonance depends on reciprocity: you do things – you have to launch the business, organise the campaign, set off on the wilderness trek, send the email about the social event – and then see how the world responds.

Collapsing on to the sofa at the end of a long day spent deep-cleaning your home, or organising all your digital files into an orderly hierarchy of folders, it’s easy to conclude that you must have used your time well: consider how exhausted you feel! But perhaps your home could have waited another month for a deep clean. And maybe you should never

Because the irony, of course, is that just doing something once today, just steering your kayak over the next few inches of water, is the only way you’ll ever become the kind of person who does that sort of thing on a regular basis anyway. Otherwise – and believe me, I’ve been there – you’re merely the kind of person who spends your life drawing up

And so one day, feeling she had little to lose from trying something different, she asked herself what would happen if she did what she felt like doing, when she felt like doing it – which is another way of asking the question we encountered yesterday: What if this were easy?

The less I’m trying to get something out of an experience, the more I find I can get into it, and the more I can be present for other people involved in it. This is not to say that life becomes a matter of unbroken good cheer; after all, it’s sad that a beautiful moment arises then vanishes. But it’s the flavour of sadness conveyed by the Japanese