Notes from Meditations for Mortals

Raw notes

INTRODUCTION The imperfect life

• your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence,
• stepping more fully into them, is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life
• the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be ‘out of the way’, so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now.
• the sense of having far too much to do in the time available for doing it.
• the worst of it is that our efforts to address the problem seem only to exacerbate it.
• the epidemic of burnout, which isn’t merely a matter of exhaustion, but of the emptiness that comes from years of pushing oneself, machine-like, to do more and more, without it ever feeling like enough.
• feel obliged to be always enhancing
• that is, to try to exert more control
• everyday experience, along with centuries of philosophical reflection, attests to the fact that a fulfilling and accomplished life isn’t a matter of exerting ever more control.
• To be delighted by another person, or moved by a landscape or a work of art, requires not being in full control.
• Resonance depends on reciprocity:
• because being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends.
• When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count.
• So my goal here is for whatever you might find useful in these pages to sink under your skin and into your bones and thus to persist.
• trust that if something strikes a chord, it’ll linger through the day by itself.

Week One: BEING FINITE

• facing the truth can only help.
• late British Zen master Hōun Jiyu-Kennett,
• Her teaching style, she liked to say, was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.
• The failure he’d told himself he couldn’t possibly allow to occur had, in fact, occurred, and it hadn’t destroyed him.
• 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.
• A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht.
• The challenge, then, is simple, though for many of us also excruciating: What’s one thing you could do today – or tomorrow at the latest, if you’re reading this at night – that would constitute a good-enough use of a chunk of your finite time, and that you’d actually be willing to do?
• 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.
• it’s almost never literally the case that you have to meet a work deadline, honour a commitment, answer an email, fulfil a family obligation, or anything else.
• for most of us, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves the burden of making a bold choice.
• Freedom to examine the trade-offs – because there will always be trade-offs – and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.
• you don’t actually have to do any of this. Use your time in a worthwhile manner, I mean.
• psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers’,
• we overlay this everyday sense of obligation with the existential duty
• the Taoist writer Jason Gregory explains,
• actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.
• Moving more quickly through an infinite incoming supply of something never gets you to the end of it.
• treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.
• resist the urge to stockpile knowledge.
• remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else.
• 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,
• today we live in what’s been called a ‘delayed-return environment’, in which it can take weeks or months to discover if a potential problem is real or not.

Week Two: TAKING ACTION

• often the truth is that we invest plenty of energy in making sure we never get around to them.
• The more you organise your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems
• Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk who explains it in a lovely book entitled Time Surfing.
• go into the shed. Don’t do anything yet, just look around.
• One excellent practical way to befriend a gnawing rat is to ask yourself what you’d truly be willing to do,
• Befriending your rats is a gentle strategy, but there’s nothing submissive about it. It’s a pragmatic way to maximise your room for manoeuvre, and your capacity to make progress on the work you care about, by becoming ever more willing to acknowledge that things are as they are, whether you like it or not.
• the Rule of Saint Benedict, the one he wrote in old age and which is still in use, remains relevant because it’s a model of moderation, elegantly balancing the need for order with the need for individual freedom, and a monk’s need for solitude with the universal human need for a social life.
• 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. It’s a little unnerving, to be honest, how frequently this specific range of hours crops up in historical accounts of the daily routines
• it’s more effective to focus intensely during only your peak hours, rather than half-heartedly all day;
• creativity appears to depend partly on processes taking place in your brain while you’re not focusing.
• rest and good moods are both essential for sustained and successful work.
• stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished.
• (We might triumph over any given problem, of course; but if we had total control, we’d never confront them in the first place.)
• I am free to aspire not to a life without problems, but to a life of ever more interesting and absorbing ones.

Week Three: LETTING GO

• What the stress really signalled, I saw, was that I cared about the project, which is entirely different from saying that it needed to be complex or effortful.
• ‘Were we to meet this figure socially, this accusatory character, this internal critic, this unrelenting fault- finder, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him, that he was living in the aftermath, the fallout, of some catastrophe. And we would be right.’ – ADAM PHILLIPS
• just need to find where you already feel warmth or tenderness, then go from there.
• some part of you already feels the emotions you believe you ought to be feeling. After that, your main job is to avoid overcomplicating things.
• you inadvertently erect obstacles to action.
• the best thing to do, as a finite human with limited control, is usually not to meddle, but to let things be.
• As soon as any experience can be completely controlled, it feels cold and dead;
• ‘Here’s the magic trick: if you can’t come up with ten ideas, come up with twenty ideas.’ Quantity overpowers perfectionism,
• going through the world with the default belief that it’s full of people or things that need holding at bay is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• As the Zen teacher John Tarrant explains, the way we talk about distraction implies something equally unhelpful: a model of the human mind according to which its default state is one of stability, steadiness and single-pointed focus.
• 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’,

Week Four: SHOWING UP

• if you see all of this as leading up to some future point when real life will begin, or when you can finally start enjoying yourself, or feeling good about yourself – then you’ll end up treating your actual life as something to ‘get through’, until one day it’ll be over, without the meaningful part ever having arrived.
• It means you get to pursue those goals and feel alive and absorbed while pursuing them, instead of postponing the aliveness to when or if they’re achieved.
• showing up more fully in the present is about how you pursue your plans for the future; it certainly doesn’t require that you abandon them. It means letting go of the notion that you can’t quite allow yourself to feel fully immersed in life before those plans are realised, and coming to understand on the contrary that the pursuit of ambitious goals is one excellent way to be fully immersed in life.
• striving towards sanity is never going to work. You have to operate from sanity instead.
• it appears to be a fundamental rule that if you treat sanity as a state you have to reach by engaging in all manner of preparations, or getting other things out of the way first, then the main effect will be to reinforce the sense of sanity as something that’s out of reach.
• engage in the behaviours that constitute a meaningful life anyway, and to allow the feelings to follow, rather than spending your life scrambling fruitlessly after the feelings.
• Treat your to-do list as a menu.
• it’s surprising how many things do become more appetising once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plough through, but as options you get to pick.
• what you have, not what you don’t have.
• being willing to let others see your life as it really is can be a positive act of generosity towards them, too.
• What seems to work much better is to encourage mentors to be more candid about their own failures and struggles: true confidence is kindled not by witnessing it in others, but from realising you aren’t alone in lacking it.
• try not to compare your insides to their outsides.
• we make ourselves more miserable than necessary, not just by railing against negative experiences we’re having, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold on to good things that are happening exactly as we wanted them to.
• the Japanese tea ceremony, in which fleetingness is understood not as a threat to what’s unfolding, but as the source of its value.
• real wisdom doesn’t lie in getting life figured out. It lies in grasping the sense in which you never will get it completely figured out.
• It’s not a given, at any moment, that we’ll even be able to understand what’s happening, or what a reasonable response to it might be.
• live merely for the sake of life, without justifications or achievements.
• since life is so inherently confusing and precarious, then joy, if it’s ever to be found at all, is going to have to be found now, in the midst of the confusion and precariousness?
• My first response is to feel crestfallen; but soon thereafter comes relief. I get to give up on that futile struggle, which means I needn’t wait for it to be won before diving into reality.

Notes from Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Added 2024-10-16.