1: We like systems.
“Few things are more appealing, when we’re hoping to change our lives, than a new system for doing so,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
Perhaps our goal is to experience the peace and clarity that we believe meditation can bring.
We resolve to become meditators.
We begin by purchasing a book on changing our habits. We look through it, searching for how to turn meditation into a habit.
Next, we order a meditation cushion.
“Perhaps we even get as far as sitting down to meditate,” Oliver writes.
“But then something goes wrong. Maybe the sheer scale of the project of ‘becoming a meditator’—that is, meditating day after day for the rest of our lives—strikes us as daunting,” he notes, “so we decide to postpone the whole affair to some point in the future, when we expect to have more energy and time.”
Or perhaps we are very excited about becoming meditators. For a week or two. Until the “monotony sets in,” Oliver observes, “and the letdown feels so intolerable that we throw in the towel.”
2: What if, instead of creating a whole project around “becoming a meditator,” we simply focus on sitting down to meditate? One time. For five minutes.
“The main point,” he notes, “though it took me years to realize 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.”
Like the Nike commercial says: Just do it.
“We pick something we genuinely care about, and then, for at least a few minutes – a quarter of an hour, say – we do some of it,” Oliver writes. “Today. It really is that simple.”
But simple and easy aren’t the same thing. And “for many of us,” he notes, “it also turns out to be one of the hardest things in the world.”
Another variation of this problem is when we decide to become a different type of person as a way to unconsciously elude doing the activity.
“Suppose we want to start a business, but the prospect intimidates us,” Oliver writes. “What better way to never quite get around to it than to turn it into a long-term project?
“That way, we get to spend months doing research, and undertaking brainstorming exercises, and emulating the daily routine of one of our entrepreneurial idols, complete with 5 a.m. wake-ups and a ‘hydration protocol’… and we never have to do the scary thing at all.”
3: Imagine a kayak. And a superyacht.
“To be human,” Oliver writes, “is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards our inevitable yet unpredictable death. . .
“It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one,” he observes. “We’re at the mercy of the current, and all we can really do is to stay alert, steering as best we can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment.”
Oliver quotes the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who described this reality using the word Geworfenheit, or thrownness—”a suitably awkward word for an awkward predicament,” Oliver notes, “merely to come into existence is to find oneself thrown into a time and place we didn’t choose, with a personality we didn’t pick, and with our time flowing away beneath us, minute by minute, whether we like it or not.”
That’s a description of life as it is. Not how we want it to be.
“We’d prefer a much greater sense of control,” he notes. “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.”
Many self-development efforts and “long-term projects” fall under this illusion. We “get to spend our time daydreaming that we’re on the superyacht,” Oliver writes, “master of all we survey, and imagining how great it’ll feel to reach our destination.”
Which is quite different from actually doing something meaningful today. Like “just sitting down to meditate, just writing a few paragraphs of the novel, just giving our full attention to one exchange with our child,” he observes.
All of these actions require us to surrender our sense of control.
“It means not knowing in advance if we’ll carry it off well (we can be certain we’ll do it imperfectly),” Oliver observes. “It means facing the truth that we’re always in the kayak, never the super yacht.”
We begin by asking a simple question: “What’s one thing we could do today—that would constitute a good-enough use of a chunk of our finite time, and that we’d actually be willing to do?”
Because just paddling our kayak into the river is the only way to become the type of person who does that type of thing regularly anyway.
“So we just do the thing once,” Oliver suggests, “with absolutely no guarantee we’ll ever manage to do it again.
“But then perhaps we find that we do do it again, the next day, or a few days later, and maybe again, and again—until before we know it, we’ve developed that most remarkable thing, not a willpower-driven system or routine but an emergent practice of writing, or meditating, or listening to our kids, or building a business.”
More next week!
_______________________
Reflection: How can I embrace imperfect, small actions today instead of waiting for the perfect system or moment?
Action: Identify one small, meaningful action I can take today that aligns with my values and just do it, without worrying about perfection or long-term commitment.
What did you think of this post?
