1: “It’s always the same list,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
How to live a fulfilling life. It’s always the same list.
“Nurture our relationships, pursue challenging goals, spend time in nature, and make room for fun,” Oliver notes.
But we knew that already.
“If following a list was all it took, we’d have solved the challenge of human happiness long ago,” he observes.
2: We’ve come to the end of Oliver’s book. For the past 23 weeks, we’ve ended our weeks here at RiseWithDrew with one of Oliver’s meditations.
Today’s post is the final one.
Oliver writes: “And so I won’t be concluding here by revealing the meaning of life.
“But I do have thoughts.”
Jorge Luis Borges once wrote: “There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat’s black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.”
The spiritual teacher Joan Tollifson believes that as human beings, we have a yearning for finality. She calls it “the compulsion to closure.”
“But which the world can never satisfy.” Oliver observes.
A better strategy, then, for happiness is “gradually therefore [to] learn to relax, so as to more wholeheartedly take our place in, and as part of, the unending flow of reality.”
There are no true fresh starts, he notes. We “are already here, in time, shaped by everything that came before this moment, and with whatever personality, resources and challenges we find ourselves to have.
“Screwing up our willpower and insisting we’re leaving that all behind is unlikely to change much,” Oliver writes.
3: All is hardly lost, however. Because we can, he notes, choose to “more fully accept that we are who we are, and where we are, might change a lot, by permitting us to abandon the dream of a fresh start and actually do one thing today that truly matters, and that makes life resonate once more.”
Perhaps “it would be nice not to have to bother with any of this, of course,” Oliver explains. “There’s something to be envied in the inner life of the cat, as imagined by Jorge: 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.
That said, “humans get to accomplish much more than cats, and probably experience a far richer panoply of emotions.
“But the price we must pay,” he notes, “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.”
We can, however, choose to be what Oliver calls “an imperfectionist.” As opposed to being a “perfectionist.”
Doing so, he writes, means we “don’t have to pretend this situation is without its poignancy, its seasons of grief, its spells of loneliness, confusion or despair.
“But we no longer fight as hard as we once did to persuade ourselves this isn’t the way things are, or that human existence ought to be otherwise.
“Instead, we choose to put down that impossible burden—and to keep on putting it down when we realize, as we frequently will, that we’ve inadvertently picked it up again.
“And so we 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.”
That’s a wrap.
More next week!
_______________________
Reflection: Can I release the endless pursuit of perfection and fully accept life as it is, with all its uncertainty and beauty?
Action: Practice being an imperfectionist this week by letting go of the need to control outcomes and savoring one meaningful moment as it unfolds.
What did you think of this post?
