1: Feeling anxious or overwhelmed? Or, perhaps, a bit too full of ourselves?
The stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius has some advice for us:
“Often think of the rapidity with which things pass by and disappear. . . For substance is like a river in continual flow, and the activities of things are in constant change, and the causes work in infinite varieties; and there is hardly anything which stands still.
“And consider,” Marcus continues, “this which is near to thee, this boundless abyss of the past and of the future in which all things disappear.
“How then is he not a fool who is puffed up with such things or plagued about them and makes himself miserable? For they vex him only for a time, and a short time.”
The modern term for this exercise is “zooming out,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals.
“One might,” Oliver observes, “expect to find such reflections depressing or demotivating. But I experience them as liberating; my shoulders drop, and I’m able to exhale.
“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.”
Because reality doesn’t need us to help operate it. “It carries on fine regardless,” Oliver shares.
Which seems clear—”except that the level of stress we generally attach to our efforts to resolve our little problems would seem to imply otherwise.”
2: But if nothing matters, what’s the point of doing anything, we might ask.
“The first is that it simply need not follow,” he writes, “from our cosmic insignificance as individuals, that our actions don’t matter.
“The idea that things only count if they count on the vastest scale is one more expression of our discomfort with finitude,” Oliver explains. “Accepting that they might count only transiently, or locally, requires us to face our limitations and our mortality.”
Is it not meaningful if we live our lives and manage to help a few people along the way?
“Why,” he asks, “shouldn’t an absorbing conversation, an act of kindness, or an exhilarating hike get to count?
“Why adopt a definition that rules such things out?
“It can be enlightening, also,” Oliver writes, “to notice when our intellectual theories about what matters crumble in the face of an intuitive sense that what we’re doing is meaningful, theories be damned.”
3: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.
Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations.
At the end of each week, we are exploring some of the life lessons Oliver shares in his wonderful book Meditations for Mortals.
Another concept that proves useful to understanding the meaning in our lives is to celebrate that we are connected.
As Albert Einstein once wrote: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task,” Albert notes, “must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.”
Our existence “would be wholly impossible without countless people and things I standardly think of as separate from myself,” Oliver writes.
“Perhaps the ultimate expression of our finitude is the fact,” he observes, “that we are irrevocably of the world, whether we like it or not.”
In which case, “our responsibility isn’t to get our arms around it,” Oliver explains, “nor to justify ourselves before it, but to embody as completely as possible the momentary expression of it that we are.”
As philosopher Alan Watts reflects, “It makes just as much sense to say that we come out of the world: That in the same way a tree blossoms, the universe’ peoples.'”
We get to “pour ourselves into tasks that matter,” Oliver notes, “for no other reason than that nothing could be more enlivening, or more true to the situation in which we find ourselves.”
And there’s always plenty to do. As philosopher Derrick Jensen says, “The good thing about everything being so f***** up is that no matter where we look, there is great work to be done.”
True, we might never have been born. “But fate granted us the opportunity to get stuck into the mess we see around us, whatever it is.
“We are here. This is it. We don’t much matter—yet we matter as much as anyone ever did,” Oliver writes.
“The river of time flows inexorably on,” he observes, “amazingly, confoundingly, marvelously, we get the brief chance to go kayaking in it.”
More next week!
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Reflection: What happens when I stop trying to control or hold onto life’s moments and instead simply inhabit my small, brief place in the flow of things?
Action: Take five minutes this week to “zoom out”—notice the scale of the world and the passage of time—and let that perspective bring a sense of calm focus to whatever I’m doing right now.
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