Meditations for Mortals

Rosa calls its resonance, its capacity to touch, move and absorb us. As soon as any experience can be completely controlled, it feels cold and dead; a work of art you fully understand or a person whose behaviour you can predict with total accuracy is no fun at all. What brings fulfilment is being in a certain form of reciprocal relationship with th

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.

Zen and time management come together in Paul Loomans’s Time Surfing: The Zen Approach to Keeping Time on Your Side,

The astounding reality – in the words of Sheldon B. Kopp, a genial and brilliant American psychotherapist who died in 1999 – is that you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.

The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is simply to redefine what counts as finished. Instead of viewing the completion of a project as something that happens only occasionally, after days or weeks of work, think of your days as consisting in the sequential completion of a series of small ‘deliverables’.

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. It really is that s

The closely related final rule is to remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else.

‘If you find yourself lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house. “Well, I was lost, but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament!”’ – MITCH HEDBERG

this part matters just as much as any other and arguably even more than any other, since the past is gone and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists. If instead you take the other approach – if you see all of this as leading up to some future point when real life will begin, or when you can finally start en