Book Review: Meditation for Mortals

Summary

Such an amazing book. I’m fan of Olivier’s writing, his previous book “four thousand weeks” turned the conventional advice of productivity in its head - rather than attacking the todo list or learning new ways of “being productive”, he made me think on the finite life (we have approx 4000 weeks of life, hence the name). That book made a huge impact on me. And hence i was keen to read this one

Before I pen my thoughts on the book, one note - the title sucks. “Meditation for Mortals” is confusing - this is not a book about meditation at all. Musings, maybe. I feel he should have gone with something more reflective of the content. Like “how to live when you can’t do everything”, “Letting go of infinite to-do list”. Anyways!

The book is divided into 28 chapters, supposed to be read one chapter a day. There are 4 weeks, each week bringing it’s own theme. I made detailed notes. For anyone reading this book, my strong recommendation is NOT to read this book in one sitting. Read one chapter (each chapter is very small, 5-10 min maybe), sit and savour it and reflect. That is how I read this book and it used to be best part of my morning.

My Notes

Week 1 : Being Finite

1. Day One : It’s worse than you think
   • The key point here is we need to accept that there will never be a perfect life, never be a perfect time to do anything, things will always remain pending. And to understand, accept and embrace this reality. This is liberating to know that it is not possible to do everything and we can be liberated from the misery of trying to do everything.
2. Day Two : Kayaks and Superyachts
   • The key point here is navigate your life like you are in a kayak, with waves around you and navigating in uncertainty. Olivier calls for action for the the day : “What’s one thing you could do today - that would constitute a good-enough use of a chunk of your finite time, and that you’d actually be willing to do.”
3. Day Three : You need only face the consequences
   • In this chapter, we dig into the reality that choices comes with consequences. It is rarely that we absolutely “HAVE TO” or “CAN’T DO”. It is often we make choices with the consequences we’ll have to face on making those choices (or not making other choices). It is worth pausing and evaluate that are we overplaying the consequences in either direction (of doing vs non-doing)
   • Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs - because there will always be trade-offs - and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.
4. Day Four : Against Productivity Debt
   • Now Olivier starts with “Many people these days report the feeling that they begin each morning in a kind of ‘productivity debt’, which they must struggle to pay off over the course of the day, in hopes of returning to a zero balance by the time evening comes. If they fail - or worse, don’t even try - it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the planet”. He labels it ‘insecure overachievers’ and argues ‘we produce against the feeling of lack’
   • The key point here is life as a productivity debtor is no fun at all. It’s anxiety -inducing and exhausting.
   • Olivier proposes we keep a “done list” where we capture what we’ve done so far. The idea is great and lot of merit. But I am not very clear how the argument flows from avoiding productivity debtor feeling to keeping a done list. Won’t there be a pressure again to fill the done list. Olivier does address this by remarking : “When you start to view each day not as a matter of paying off a debt, but as an opportunity to move a small-but-meaningful number of items over to your done list, you will find yourself making better choices about what to focus on ; and you’ll make more progress on them, too, since you’ll be wasting less energy stressing about all the other tasks you’re (inevitably) neglecting.
5. Day Five : Too much information
   • Now we enter a chapter which is relevant to everyone - there is simply too much information to consume. The algorithms have gone smarter and now we’ve endless supply of high quality inputs.
   • Olivier proposes three pieces of advice:
     • Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. Think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.
     • 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 works and good ideas will later flow.
       • The difference is subtle but enormous. Stockpiling knowledge is about ownership: “I know this.” Cultivating sensibility is about orientation: “I see differently now.”
       • In short, read as though you’re apprenticing yourself to different minds, not collecting information from them. Each author teaches you a way of attending to the world, and through that, you become a little more original.
     • Remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else. Fixation of retaining facts is a poor way to reap the benefits and again takes away from doing some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now.
6. Day Six : You can’t care about everything
   • This is a continuation of previous chapter of too much information. Like we’ve lot of information, we’ve lot of events and news happening. Olivier argues that we’re more connected than ever, so that anyone scrolling a social media platform can be instantaneously invited to care about more human suffering than the greatest saints in the history would have encountered over the course of their whole lives.
   • There is another aspect - we are living in attention economy. So news / media houses are all trying to make a story very compelling to steal our attention. We are better served going deeper in few causes rather than trying to care about everything.

7. Day Seven : Let the future be the future

   • Continuing the theme of being finite, Olivier reminds us that worrying about future is of no use. Two main reasons:

     • We can’t always predict the future. It is a futile battle in the first place.
     • The relief we seek from predicting and controlling the future, this relief we will get only when the said future is done. Till then, we can never ever be sure.

   • So, a wiser approach is focus on the future, but don’t be trapped. Plan for future and then bring attention back the present. After all, present is all there is to. Your job is to do ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can.

   • “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” - Marcus Aurelius.

Week 2 : Taking Actions

Now, after embracing the reality of being finite, we go towards taking action (with this knowledge)

1. Day Eight : Decision Hunting
   • Here Olivier talks about often the life changing decisions are what we go hunting for. Again, here the focus is as we’ve finite life and we can never know all the possibilities and their outcomes, power is to Decide.
   • Olivier says a decision is a decision when:
     • You take an action against it.
     • Action can be as small as needed. As long as it is a solid action.
2. Day Nine : Finish Things
   • Main point here was to finish things and there is energy in finishing things. Author proposes break down things into smaller sections and tick it one by one.
   • This was weakest chapter so far, not much new insight. Let’s see how it links with other chapters.
3. Day Ten : Look for the life task
   • Olivier brings an idea called “life task”. By the definition, a life task is something your life is asking you to do.
   • On how can one identify current life task? He says it should be a matter of intuition. And he gives two signposts:
     • First is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficultly’ that comes from pushing back against your long established preference for comfort and security. . It is a kind of endeavor that enlarges you, rather than making you immediately happy.
     • Second is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do.
4. Day Eleven: Just go to the shed
   • The more you organize your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems - and even if they don’t, the longer you fail to confront them, the more unhappy time you spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places you don’t want to go. It’s ironic that this is known, in self-help circles, as ‘remaining in your comfort zone’, because there’s nothing comfortable about it.
   • Olivier proposes that we embrace the uncomfortable feeling and just visualize taking action and accept on emotional level that you are doing this and it is part of your reality. By this approach, you will see what actions to be taken and next steps. It is not breaking down the task into smaller task. It is defusing the anxiety you feel by transforming the kind of relationship you have with it.
5. Day Twelve : Rules that serve life
   • Olivier takes the famous example of Seinfeld of daily X and practice and give it a spin - rather than doing things Daily, he advocates for doing it Dailyish. So to not be wrapped in blinding lead by rule but applying own choice and driving.
   • ‘Dailyish’ is a much more resilient rule: it’s less of a high-wire act, where one mistake could end everything. But emotionally speaking, it’s an unsettling rule to follow - because doing something dailyish requires sacrificing your fantasies of perfection in favour of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete, imperfect progress, here and now.
6. Day 13 : Three hours
   • Ok, this chapter was very interesting. Olivier says “If you are a knowledge worker, 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”
   • There are many examples given for this. I guess some of it is coming from the famous book “Daily Rituals” by Mason Currey.
   • He further argues : “This straightforward approach encapsulates more limit-embracing wisdom than might at first be apparent. To begin with, it acknowledges the reality that most of us don’t have the capacity for more than a few daily hours of intense concentration. But it also respects limitation in another important way: it frees you from the futile perfectionistic struggle to try to make the whole day unfold in accordance with your desires. It respects the fact that your work demands”
   • The truly valuable skill is the one the three-to-four-hour rule helps to instil: not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished.
7. Day 14 : Develop a taste for problems
   • We will always be surrounded by problems. That is the nature of finite life. Problem is the job. Anyone, or a piece of software can do the job, if it weren’t for the problems”
   • “… life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one. The magnitude of the problem might surprise you, but the fact that new complications in your life are arising hour by hour is absolutely to be expected.”
   • You needn’t reflect for long on the subject of human limitation to see that the existence of problems simply follows, unavoidably, from the facts of finitude; at the most abstract level, ‘problem’ is just the word we apply to any situation in. which we confront the limits of our capacity to control how things unfold.
   • But to face no problems at all would Leave you with nothing worth doing; so you might even say that coming up against your limitations, and figuring out how to respond, is precisely what makes a life meaningful and satisfying. There’s a clue to be found in the leisure activities to which many of us gravitate, after a workday spent resenting our problems: we play board games, or watch police dramas, or learn musical instruments, or try our hand at cooking new dishes - none of which would be any fun if it weren’t for the problem-solving involved.

Week 3 : Letting Go

1. Day Fifteen : What if this were easy?
   • The title immediately reminded me of Tim Ferriss question: “What would this looks like if this were easy?”. The chapter goes to discuss the assumption that anything worth doing must be hard and a similar bogus reverse logic that whatever takes efforts must matter.
   • This chapter was a good reminder that it takes guts, you have to ‘be willing to let it be easy’. One can be so type A, driven in life, that we don’t pause and consider that beyond motivation, the tasks can be fun too and it doesn’t have to harder than what it actually is.
   • Olivier closes the chapter with a great line : “What the stress really signaled, I saw, was that I cared about the project, which is entirely different from saying that it needed to be complex or effortful”
2. Day Sixteen: The reverse golden rule (On not being your worst enemy)
   • Here focus is that our drive for productivity should not be wrapped in self identity. And we should not beat ourselves if we are not motivated.
   • “It’s easy to believe that if you let yourself do what you want, you might spend the day scrolling slack-jawed through Instagram. But often the truth is that ‘scrolling slack-jawed through Instagram’is what happens after you’ve told yourself you can’t do what you want, because you can’t afford to or don’t deserve to - and you grow so resentful or annoyed by whatever you try to force yourself to do instead that you reach for your phone as a distraction.”
   • He talks about reverse golden rule’ - that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else.
3. Day Seventeen : Don’t stand in generosity’s way
   • Focus here is on generosity. Olivier makes a great point that even for trying to help someone, we should again not chase for perfection - wanting to be optimally kind instead of just kind, or wanting to feel in full control of your time and obligations
   • He advocates on act on a generous impulse the moment it arises.
4. Day Eighteen: Allow other people their problem
   • Focus here is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belong to them. And you have to allow other people their problems. This is one more area in which the best thing to do, as a finite human with limited control, is usually not to meddle, but to let things be.
   • One of the main reasons we fail to treat other peoples emotions in this clear-headed way is that they sail under the flag of ‘urgency’. Some tasks are legitimately time-sensitive, of course; but the unpleasant anxiety that attaches itself to tasks we’ve deemed ‘urgent’ is often a sign that someone else’s priorities are in control. The sense of urgency is really the fear that someone else will get angry or anxious if you don’t hurry up. Again, maybe it’s in your interests to forestall that outcome. But then again, maybe it isn’t: their feelings have no magic power to reach out and force you to act.
5. Day Nineteen : A good time or a good story
   • This chapter focuses that we are always seeking control. But a famous saying is that “Everything that happens, is either a good time or a good story”. Progress is good, lot of improvements are made by human’s quest for control : improved medical condition, reducing poverty and all. So, trying to control and progress is good. But the world is inherently uncontrollable. Our desire for controllability backfires, undermining our efforts to build happy and fulfilling lives.
   • “The more we try to render the world controllable, the more it eludes us ; and the more daily life loses its resonance, its capacity to touch, move and absorb us.” Main point is we should engage with the life, make plans, don’t sit idle but try not to control the outcome too much. It is often in serendipity of the life where we find our most treasured moments.
6. Day Twenty: Set a quantity goal
   • As the title suggest, instead of focusing on a set quality target, better to set a quantity goal : x minutes of writing, 500 min of words a day, 5 blog ideas generated…
   • Perfectionism is your brain trying to protect you from harm. From coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and could cause you to suffer pain. We like the brain. But you have to shut the brain off to come up with the ideas.
   • Julian said that ideas are like clogged water pipe. You need to let the bad water (bad idea) flow for some time before you can get the good water (good ideas)
7. Day Twenty One : What’s an interruption, anyway?
   • Anyone with even a passing interest in personal product ivity will have tried, at some point, to tame interruptions and distraction by means of techniques like ‘time-boxing’, in which you decide in advance which tasks you’ll complete during each hour of the day, or focus rituals to help you master your attention and resist mind-wandering, or just by hiding in some corner of your home or workplace where there’s less chance of being disturbed. On a larger scale, you can fall into the trap of viewing your whole life this way, interpreting all the things you’re actually doing with your days as one extended series of interruptions or distractions from what you think youre meant to be doing with them.
   • Olivier is not arguing that there is something wrong with this ; it’s fine to have strong preference for how you’d like your day to unfolder. But at the very least, it’s a reminder not to cling so confidently to those preferences that you turn life into a constant struggle against events you’ve decided, futilely, shouldn’t be happening. Or that you close off the possibility that what looks like an interruption might in fact prove a welcome development.
   • As the Zen teacher John Tarrant explains, the way talk about distraction implies something equally unhelpful model of the human mind according to which it dear state is one of stability, steadiness and single-pointed focus. “Telling myself I’m distracted, he writes, is a way of yanking on the leash and struggling to get back to equilibrium.
   • Looking at things from this angle, you might even argue that what makes modern digital distraction so pernicious isnt the way it disrupts attention, but the fact that it bolds it, with content algorithmically engineered to compel people for hours, thereby rendering them less available for the serendipitous and fruitful kind of distraction.

Week 4 : Showing Up

1. Day Twenty Two : Stop being so kind to Future You
   • Another stellar powerful chapter. Oliver takes on the discussion in the direction of immersing completely in the present. He starts by re-iterating what he captured in the previous chapters : Present matter more than the past or future, since the past is gone and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists.
     • This also resonates most with all the meditation advice. In his book on meditation, when Osho talks about building awareness, it is cultivating awareness of the present and being free of mind constant pull towards either the past or future
     • Osho viewed the past and future as extensions of the mind, distinct from the reality of the present moment. He argued that the past is a dead collection of memories and the future is an imagined projection, and that by focusing on them, one loses contact with the only real thing: the present. He taught that a life of anxiety, regret, and repetition comes from the mind dwelling on past and future, and that freedom and life are only found in a fresh, alert, and unburdened present.
     • Your future cannot be anything but your modified past – a little refined, a little more decorated. But it is going to be the same because the mind cannot think of the unknown; the mind can only project the known, that which you know. You fall in love with a woman and then the woman dies. Now what are you going to look for in another woman? The new woman is going to be a modified form of your dead wife. That is the only way you know: whatever you do in the future will be nothing but a continuation of the past. You can change a little – a patch here, a patch there – but the main part will remain the same, just the same.
   • If you take the approach that all of current effort is leading up to some future point when real life will begin, or when you can 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.
   • Oliver goes deeper and discuss two personality types : commitment-phobe and too-responsible kind.
   • The commitment-phobe can’t bear to enter time and space completely because letting himself be pinned down to one relationship or career path means renouncing the other ones. He imagines that what he’s doing instead is keeping his options open, though he has of course chosen a path - because choosing to use up some of your finite time in a state of non-commitment is still a choice.
   • On the other hand, the too-responsible type holds off from entering time and space completely by always locating the real value of her present-day actions somewhere off in the future. In a sense, a “provisional life’ - to take life too seriously: to obsess so much about using your time wisely or efficiently for future purposes that you find yourself treating the present as mere preparation for the stage when you’ll have everything running smoothly.
   • Really, though, showing up more fully in the present is about how you pursue your plans for the future; it certainly doesnt 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 realized, and coming to understand on the contrary that the pursuit of ambitious goals is one excellent way to be fully immersed in life. (Looking back, I see that I was always telling myself that once I figured out how to be a national newspaper journalist, or a good partner, or the best possible parent, T’d let myself relax into those roles; now, at least on my better days, I realize that the activity of figuring such things out is the substance of an absorbing life, not something I need to do in order to prepare for one.)

2. Day Twenty Three : How to start from sanity

   • ‘To treat life as a pilgrimage to a future and better existence is to disown its present value.’

   • One conclusion that follows from the fact that this is it is that striving towards sanity is never going to work. You have to operate from sanity instead.

   • In his book Anti-Time Management, Richie Norton boils this philosophy down to two steps. One: ‘Decide who you want to be.’ Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately.’

   • The signature behavior of the striver-towards-sanity is ‘clearing the decks’: trying to deal with all the minor tasks tugging at your attention in an effort to arrive at the point when you finally expect to have large stretches of time to focus on what you care about. The trouble with clearing the decks, as we’ve seen, is that the supply of things to fill the decks is to all intents and purposes limitless. So a commitment to clearing the decks leads inexorably to a life spent unendingly clearing the decks.

   • Treat your to-do list as a menu. In the striving-towards-sanity mindset, a to-do list is always something you’ve got to get to the end of before you’re allowed to relax. But in any context where there are more things that feel like they need doing than there’s time available in which to do them – which is the normal state of affairs, after all – a to-do list is by definition really a menu, a list of tasks to pick from, rather than to get through. And operating from sanity means treating it that way: starting with the acknowledgment that you won’t complete everything you might wish, then making your selections from the menu. Obviously, not every task on every to-do list will be as appetizing as the restaurant analogy suggests. But it’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plow through, but as options you get to pick.

3. Day Twenty Four : Scruffy hospitality
   • Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than in the impression your home or lawn makes.
   • 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.
4. Day Twenty Five : You can’t hoard life (on letting the moments pass)
   • ‘The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.’
   • Among spiritual traditions, Buddhism is uniquely insightful when it comes to this specific form of suffering – how 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. That’s what’s going on whenever you fail to savor a moment in nature, or with a newborn, or while eating an exceptional meal, because you’re too focused on trying to savor it, or somehow extend it into the future. It’s also what happens when you’re too busy attempting to ‘make memories’ from an experience so as to be able to reflect upon it later – or, worse, to post pictures on social media.
   • Spending your days trying to get experiences ‘under your belt,’ so as to maximize your collection of them, or to feel more confident about their future supply, means you never get to enjoy them properly because another agenda is at play. It’s nice to collect memories, of course, but the way to do that isn’t to go about trying to collect them. It’s living them as fully as possible, so as to remember them vividly later.
     • Reminds me of my best memory, floating in sea with rainbow over head with Riya floating alongside me. We were NOT trying to make a memory, just being present in the moment.
   • Great attention should be given to a tea gathering, which we can speak of as ‘one time, one meeting’ (ichi-go, ichi-e). Even though the host and guests may see each other often socially, one day’s gathering can never be repeated exactly. Viewed this way, the meeting is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime occasion.
   • 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 flavor of sadness conveyed by the Japanese phrase mono no aware, a wistful pathos at the transience of things, the kind of poignant sadness that deepens an experience instead of detracting from it. The kind you feel once you’re no longer grasping at the moment, thereby undermining your experience of it, but stepping more fully into it. Feeling yourself a part of it. Being it.
5. Day Twenty Six : Inconceivable (on the solace of doubt)
   • 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.
   • In this book, we’ve focused on what follows from the fact that we’re so limited in how much we’re able to do, how much time we get, and how much control we’re able to exert. But we’re constrained, as well, by an arguably even more basic intellectual limitation, which it’s easy to lose sight of, in our era of so much information and advanced scientific knowledge. 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.
   • Those of us accustomed to relying on our intellects to power us through our days can get jumpy at the idea of relying on them less – of not always stopping to do research or think things through before acting on our intuitions. Those of us accustomed to relying on our intellects to power us through our days can get jumpy at the idea of relying on them less – of not always stopping to do research or think things through before acting on our intuitions.
6. Day Twenty Seven : C’est fait par du monde (on giving it a shot)
   • part of the natural environment, then it must have been made by one or more flawed and finite people – not one of whom had any greater ability to overcome their built-in human limitations than you. The greatest novel you ever read? A person wrote it. The most effective philanthropic organization on the planet? Just people. The Golden Gate Bridge, the Pyramids at Giza, and the Palace of Versailles? More people. And the corollary, of course, is that if people did all that, there’s no inherent reason why you couldn’t also do, or contribute to, astounding things as well.
   • Likewise, if you’ve been thinking of making a radical change in your life – traveling the world in midlife, say, or educating your kids outside the school system – there’s a solid chance you can scrabble together the resources and figure out a way. You won’t feel like you know what you’re doing. But nobody ever does; that’s just how it is for finite humans, attempting new things. The main difference between those who accomplish great things anyway and those who don’t is that the former don’t mind not knowing. They were not less flawed or finite than you. Everything they ever did was done by people.

7. Day Twenty Eight : What matters (on finding your way)

   • 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. One might expect to find such reflections depressing or demotivating. But I experience them as liberating; my shoulders drop, and I’m able to exhale. The truth, as one spiritual teacher puts it, is that reality doesn’t need me to help operate it. It carries on fine regardless. Which is obvious – except that the level of stress we generally attach to our efforts to resolve our little problems would seem to imply otherwise.
   • We have reached the end of this book. Yet throughout it all, I’ve shirked what some might view as my one job in a book like this: explaining which things – which projects, activities, relationships and experiences – make for the most meaningful life. The reason is that in your case, I haven’t much of a clue – and I’m certain it’s intrinsic to the value of any answer that we each arrive at it ourselves. There are few more reliable ways to destroy any feelings of meaning, or the sense of vibrancy and aliveness that Hartmut Rosa calls resonance, than by attempting to implement some book’s list of Fulfilling Ways to Live. 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.
   • Perhaps the ultimate expression of our finitude is the fact that we are irrevocably of the world, whether we like it or not. If so, then maybe our responsibility isn’t to get our arms around it, nor to justify ourselves before it, but to embody as completely as possible the momentary expression of it that we are.
   • You might easily never have been born, but fate granted you the opportunity to get stuck into the mess you see around you, whatever it is. You are here. This is it. You don’t much matter – yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. The river of time flows inexorably on; amazingly, confoundingly, marvelously, we get the brief chance to go kayaking in it.

Olivier finishes this lovely book with this last poignant para:

There’s something to be envied in the inner life of the cat, as imagined by Borges: like most non-human animals, at least as far as we know, it lives only here and now, with no capacity to contemplate any other possibility. Humans get to accomplish much more than cats, and probably to experience a far richer panoply of emotions. But the price we must pay is facing hard truths: that we’ll die; that life unfolds one moment after another; that each moment represents a choice among competing ways of spending our time, so that agonizing choices, and the sacrifice of alternative worthy paths, are inevitable; and that we’ll never achieve emotional invulnerability, or a sense of full control. As an imperfectionist, you don’t have to pretend this situation is without its poignancy, its seasons of grief, its spells of loneliness, confusion or despair. But you no longer fight as hard as you once did to persuade yourself this isn’t the way things are, or that human existence ought to be otherwise. Instead, you choose to put down that impossible burden – and to keep on putting it down when you realize, as you frequently will, that you’ve inadvertently picked it up again. And so you move forward into life with greater vigor, a more peaceful mind, more openness to others, and, on your better days, the exhilaration that comes from savoring reality’s bracing air.

Favorite Quotes

“What’s one thing you could do today - that would constitute a good-enough use of a chunk of your finite time, and that you’d actually be willing to do.” Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs - because there will always be trade-offs - and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

“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” - Marcus Aurelius.

“Everything that happens, is either a good time or a good story”

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

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.

‘The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.’