Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkehead

Annotations from Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkehead

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

One main tenet of imperfectionism is that 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.

Always over the horizon, meanwhile, hovered the fantasy of one day ‘getting on top of things’ – where ‘things’ could mean anything from emptying my inbox to figuring out how romantic relationships were supposed to work – so that the truly meaningful part of life, the really real part, could finally begin.

Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.’

Your days begin to fill with less important tasks – because your belief that there must be a way to do it all means you flinch from making difficult decisions about what’s truly worth your limited time.

My conversations helped me recognise a deeper issue, too, which is the way our ceaseless efforts to get into the driver’s seat of life seem to sap it of the very sense of aliveness that makes it worth living in the first place.

It’s hardly surprising that so many of us spend so much of our lives attempting to lever ourselves into a position of dominance over a reality that can otherwise seem so unmanageable and overwhelming. How else are you supposed to handle all those to-dos, pursue a few cherished ambitions, take a stab at being a decent parent or partner, and do your bit as a citizen of a world in crisis? But it doesn’t work. Life edges ever closer to being a dull, solitary, and often infuriating chore, something to be endured, in order to make it to a supposedly better time, which never quite seems to arrive.

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.

‘What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.’ – eugene gendlin

that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin. Very well, then: this is how things are.

it’s precisely because you’ll never produce perfect work that you might as well get on with doing the best work you can; and that it’s because intimate relationships are too complex ever to be negotiated entirely smoothly that you might as well commit to one, and see what happens. There are no guarantees – except the guarantee that holding back from life instead is a recipe for anguish.

(‘Our suffering,’ as Mel Weitsman, another Zen teacher, puts it, ‘is believing there’s a way out.’)

You’re already stranded on the desert island, with nothing but old airplane food to subsist on, and no option but to make the best of life with your fellow survivors.

‘That which seems like a false step is just the next step.’ – agnes martin

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.

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. If you don’t prioritise the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of _becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.

What you could have done instead was to forget about the whole project of ‘becoming a meditator,’ and focus solely on sitting down to meditate. Once. For five minutes.

pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger described this state of affairs using the word Geworfenheit, or ‘thrownness,’ a suitably awkward word for an awkward predicament: merely to come into existence is to find oneself thrown into a time and place you didn’t choose, with a personality you didn’t pick, and with your time flowing away beneath you, minute by minute, whether you like it or not.

Rather than paddling by kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge. Systems and schemes for self-improvement, and ‘long-term projects,’ all feed this fantasy: you get to spend your time daydreaming that you’re on the superyacht, master of all you survey, and imagining how great it’ll feel to reach your destination. By contrast, actually doing one meaningful thing today – just sitting down to meditate, just writing a few paragraphs of the novel, just giving your full attention to one exchange with your child – requires surrendering a sense of control. It means not knowing in advance if you’ll carry it off well (you can be certain you’ll do it imperfectly), or whether you’ll end up becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing all the time. And so it is an act of faith. It means facing the truth that you’re always in the kayak, never 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? (Don’t get distracted wondering what might be the best thing to do: that’s superyacht thinking, borne of the desire to feel certain you’re on the right path.)

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 plans for how you’re going to become a different kind of person later on. This will sometimes garner you the admiration of others, since it can look from the outside like you’re busily making improvements. But it isn’t the same at all.

Something you do not solely to become a better sort of person – though it may have that effect, too – but because whatever you’re bringing into reality, right here on the rapids, is worth bringing into reality for itself.

‘You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.’ – sheldon b. kopp

The conservative American economist Thomas Sowell summed things up with a bleakness I appreciate, insisting that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.

There’s an elephant in the room here that can’t be tidied away, of course, which is that the consequences of any given choice might be vastly more severe for some people than for others. There are those who’d get fired if they ignored a few emails, or violently abused for a toy-strewn house. But these grossly unfair realities don’t change the fact that each choice is always and only a matter of weighing the trade-offs.

But 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.

This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: 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.

(Recall Woody Allen’s line about taking a speed-reading course, then tackling War and Peace: ‘It’s about Russia.’)

resist the urge to stockpile knowledge.

Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow.

Just because certainty about the future is off the table, though, it doesn’t mean you can’t feel confident in your abilities to deal with the future when it does eventually arrive.

Marcus Aurelius reassures readers of his Meditations: ‘Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.’

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.

The life-enhancing route is to think of decisions not as things that come along, but as things to go hunting for. In other words: to operate on the assumption that somewhere, in the confusing morass of your work or your life, lurks at least one decision you could make, right now, in order to get unstuck and get moving.

‘Most people believe a deficit in knowing is their problem,’ Chandler writes. They ‘believe that they don’t know what to do, so it will take time before they do it.’ But choosing? ‘Takes no time. When you choose you’ve already chosen.’

(What the novelist E. L. Doctorow said about novel-writing applies to everything else, too: it’s ‘like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’)

People think finishing things ‘would drain even more of their energy and they get tired just thinking about it,’ Steve Chandler writes. They don’t see ‘that leaving things unfinished is what’s causing the low levels of energy.’ (He suggests spending one day robotically completing as much unfinished business as you can: ‘Notice at the end of that day how much energy you’ve got. You’ll be amazed.’)

Completion ceases to be a matter of occasional, stress-filled crescendos of effort, and your days instead involve a low-key process of moving small, clearly defined packages of work across your desk and out the door. Each ending provides an energy-boost for the next.

It works so well, I suspect, because it means acting in harmony with reality: for finite humans, every moment is an endpoint of sorts, experienced once then done with forever. Treating what you do with your time as a sequence of tiny completions means falling into line with how things really are. ‘Work is done, then forgotten,’ says the Tao Te Ching. ‘Therefore it lasts forever.’ You’re no longer fighting the current, but letting it carry you forward.

‘Going was dying, and staying was dying. When we get to junctures like that, we had better choose the dying that enlarges rather than the one that keeps us stuck.’ – JAMES HOLLIS

What’s the life task here? Never mind what you want. What does life want? (And if the very idea that ‘life’ might be able to ‘want’ things strikes you as unforgivably unscientific, then your life task, for the next few paragraphs, is to put your scepticism briefly to one side.)

By definition, a life task is something your life is asking of you; so while it might coincide with your parents’ expectations, or your society’s ideals, it also very easily might not. As it happens, Jung’s moment of insight propelled him in the direction his father also wished him to go. Yet stepping up to a life task might just as easily mean resisting expectations instead.

How can you identify your current life task? That must always be a matter of intuition. But there are two signposts that may help. The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty,’ as Jung puts it – and specifically with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long-established preference for comfort and security.

The second signpost is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do.

distinguish the idea of a life task from certain popular notions of ‘destiny’ or ‘calling,’ which can leave people feeling as though there’s something they’re meant to be doing with their lives, but that their life circumstances make it impossible.

That can’t be the case with a life task, which emerges, by definition, from whatever your life circumstances are. It’s what’s being asked of you, with your particular skills, resources and personality traits, in the place where you actually find yourself.

The most remarkable part is that while you might have assumed that complying with a life task would feel oppressive – you’re ‘complying’ with a ‘task,’ after all – it never does. It gives you the feeling of getting a handle on life, because the life to which you’re addressing the question is the one you actually have. It is never the case that there’s no next step to take.

On some level, I think we always already know when we’re hiding out in some domain of life, flinching from a challenge reality has placed before us. The purpose of a question like ‘What’s the life task here?’ is just to haul that knowledge up into the daylight of consciousness, where we can finally do something about it.

maybe you don’t really want to do your work at all, but you just think that you ought to want to do it, so you’re seeking a system to try to force the missing desire into existence. We want a rule to shoulder the burden of living on our behalf. It’s a quid pro quo: we’ll follow it religiously and, in return, won’t have to take so much moment-to-moment responsibility for making the most of our lives.

‘Were you really expecting to have no more problems at some point in your life?’

most of us, except perhaps the very Zen or the very elderly, move through our days with a similar if largely unconscious assumption that at some point – maybe not soon, but eventually – we’ll make it to the phase of life which won’t involve confronting an endless fusillade of things to deal with.

doubly problematic. First, there’s the problem itself. But then there’s the way in which the very existence of any such problems undermines our yearning to feel perfectly secure and in control.

A friend of mine vividly recalls the uplifting and energising moment when, feeling burdened like Harris by the endless problems that seemed to get in the way of her doing her job, it dawned on her that the problems were the job.

Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering.

often the real challenge, in building an accomplished and absorbing life, is learning to let go.

The entrepreneur and podcaster Tim Ferriss phrases the question slightly differently: ‘What would this look like if this were easy?’ That puts the focus on specifics, on actions you could undertake – and of course the idea isn’t to imagine some parallel dimension in which a task might be easy, but to permit yourself to consider the possibility that it might in fact be easy in this one.

The New Age author Julia Rogers Hamrick once wrote a book, Choosing Easy World, in which she argues it’s as simple as repeating a mantra: ‘I choose to live in Easy World, where everything is easy.’

it functions not as a mystical command to the universe but as a reminder to yourself not to fall into the old habit of adding complications or feelings of unpleasant exertion where neither need exist.

Facing up to reality – as finite humans must – means facing up to the reality of your moods, desires, and interests, too.

if you’re the kind of person who worries that they might be deficient in generosity or kindness, it’s far more likely that you have all sorts of generous thoughts and impulses, all the time, and that your problem – if you’re anything like me – is that you repeatedly fail to do very much about them. Or to be more precise: you inadvertently erect obstacles to action.

act on a generous impulse the moment it arises.

Far better to locate the generosity that’s already inside you, then be sure not to get in its way.

Almost everything that happens, according to an adage of uncertain origin, is either a good time or a good story.

Either things go right, or they go wrong; and surprisingly often when they do go wrong – although of course not invariably – life ends up unaccountably better as a result.

Set a quantity goal

(‘Quantity has a quality all its own,’ as someone once said, though there’s an uncomfortable possibility that it may have been Joseph Stalin.)

A more pragmatic and imperfectionist way to ease up on a fixation with outcomes is to set a quantity goal.

The entrepreneur James Altucher suggests a daily practice of writing down ten ideas, about whatever seems compelling, on a notepad: ten people to reach out to, ten possible plans for the weekend, ten ways to make money, etcetera. What if you can’t think of ten? ‘Here’s the magic trick: if you can’t come up with ten ideas, come up with twenty ideas.’ Quantity overpowers perfectionism

The alternative to the stare-at-the-screen approach to writing is ‘freewriting,’ in which you set a time-based quantity goal – ten minutes, say – then write, without stopping, until your timer goes off. (In no way is this technique only useful for professional writers: you can use it to write about any professional or personal challenge you’re facing.)

The method surprises me, over and over. Sometimes because it leads to good writing or creative solutions, and at other times because it reminds me that when my output falls wildly short of my standards – when the writing’s no good, or no creative solution presents itself – the world never actually seems to collapse.

We try so hard to cling to the rock face of fixed focus; we fall off, again and again – yet when we do, as Tarrant beautifully puts it, ‘the world catches us every time.’

‘To treat life as a pilgrimage to a future and better existence is to disown its present value.’ – W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

from the essayist Anne Lamott: Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.

Knowing that I needn’t project a facade of flawless competence before I can start daunting work or reach out to others – because I understand that everyone else has a similarly messy inner world – leaves me far more likely to do so. Moreover, something about the fact that we’re all in the same predicament leaves me feeling supported by others in what I do, rather than engaged in stress-inducing, zero-sum competition against them.

If not needing to wrap your mind around what’s happening can provide a measure of solace and breathing-room in that situation, how might it help us get unstuck from the countless lesser difficulties that beset us all the time? Where could you take useful action on an important project, today, despite not really knowing how to proceed on it beyond that initial step? What issue in your life could you patch up – what relationship could you mend, what behaviour could you alter – without fully grasping what went wrong in the first place?

Most radically of all, what additional satisfaction could you take in your life, what fun could you have, once you glimpse a truth that must have come intuitively to premodern people, which is that 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?

Nothing that anyone has ever done required superhuman capacities in order to do it.

I’m always taken aback by the relaxation that floods through me when I’m reminded of my almost complete lack of importance in the scheme of things.

Instead, you choose to put down that impossible burden – and to keep on putting it down when you realise, as you frequently will, that you’ve inadvertently picked it up again. And so you move forward into life with greater vigour, a more peaceful mind, more openness to others, and, on your better days, the exhilaration that comes from savouring reality’s bracing air.