“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.” —Oliver Burkeman
I’m reading a chapter a day from Oliver Burkeman’s pragmatic and wise new book Meditations for Mortals. This has been an apt way to approach a book which suggests that daily-ish is a perfect tempo for the important things in life. It’s allowed me to hold each chapter’s core idea in mind as I move through the world — seeing if it feels true and if there is a space where I can apply it.
I like the central conceit: that it’s impossible to do everything that you need or want to do, and that accepting your finitude sets you free to act without drama, as and where necessary. You can give up the delusion that you will ever be ‘done’ — that one day the conditions will be right for you to do the thing you’ve been putting off. Instead you can look for decisions that you can take now, merely do a thing that needs to be done, and move forward without agonising or procrastinating.
As the chapters are short, I’m enjoying using any remaining reading time to rotate through a small collection of books, dipping in here and there. I’ve previously been someone who dourly ploughs through one book at a time, resolute about finishing, even if my progress has slowed to a crawl, but I’ve been reading much more since I finally took Austin Kleon’s advice to ditch books that bore you and flit around to keep things fresh. (I also like his advice about letting books talk to each other). The first essay in the Calvino collection (below) is about the quality of ‘lightness’ in literature, and recently I find that it applies to many other aspects of life. There is something about loosening your grip, a certain allowing, that makes doing hard things easier. In fact, perhaps the secret is that treating hard things as hard is a recipe for proving yourself right.
In the mix at the moment: