Meditations For Mortals - by Oliver Burkeman
Published:
Meditations For Mortals - by Oliver Burkeman
Read: 2025-05-31
Recommend: 10/10
The author Oliver Burkeman worte one of my favorite books: Four Thousand Weeks. This new book is another gem.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
But none of this is because you’re an ill-disciplined loser, or because you haven’t yet read the right bestseller revealing ‘the surprising science’ of productivity, leadership, parenting, or anything else. It’s because being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends. It just means that the list of worthwhile things you could in principle do with your time will always be vastly longer than the list of things for which you’ll have time. It just means you’ll always be vulnerable to unforeseen disasters or distressing emotions, and that you’ll never have more than partial influence over how your time unfolds, no matter what YouTubers in their early twenties with no kids might have to say about the ideal morning routine. Imperfectionism is the outlook that understands this to be good news. It’s not that facing finitude isn’t painful. (That’s why the quest for control is so alluring.) Confronting your non-negotiable limitations means accepting that life entails tough choices and sacrifices, that regret is always a possibility, as is disappointing others, and that nothing you create in the world will ever measure up to the perfect standards in your head. But these truths are also the very things that liberate you to act, and to experience resonance. When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count. When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them. And when you stop making your sanity or self-worth dependent on first reaching a state of control that humans don’t get to experience, you’re able to start feeling sane and enjoying life now, which is the only time it ever is.
an important psychological shift occurs whenever you realize that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible. Something inside unclenches. It’s equivalent to that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin. Very well, then: this is how things are. Once you see it’s just unavoidably the case that you’ll only ever get to do a fraction of the things that in an ideal world you might like to do, anxiety subsides, and a new willingness arises to get stuck in to what you actually can do.
The late British Zen master Hōun Jiyu-Kennett, born Peggy Kennett, had a vivid way of capturing the sense of inner release that can come from grasping just how intractable our human limitations really are. Her teaching style, she liked to say, was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. Metaphorically speaking, lightening someone’s burden means encouraging them to believe that, with sufficient effort, their struggles might be overcome: that they might indeed find a way to feel like they’re doing enough, or that they’re competent enough, or that relationships are a piece of cake, and so on. Kennett’s insight was that it can often be kinder and more effective to make their burden heavier – to help them see how totally irredeemable their situation is, thereby giving them permission to stop struggling.
The challenge, then, is simple, though for many of us also excruciating: What’s one thing you could do today – or tomorrow at the latest, if you’re reading this at night – that would constitute a good-enough use of a chunk of your finite time, and that you’d actually be willing to do? (Don’t get distracted wondering what might be the best thing to do: that’s superyacht thinking, borne of the desire to feel certain you’re on the right path.) Because the irony, of course, is that just doing something once today, just steering your kayak over the next few inches of water, is the only way you’ll ever become the kind of person who does that sort of thing on a regular basis anyway. Otherwise – and believe me, I’ve been there – you’re merely the kind of person who spends your life drawing up plans for how you’re going to become a different kind of person later on. This will sometimes garner you the admiration of others, since it can look from the outside like you’re busily making improvements. But it isn’t the same at all. So you just do the thing, once, with absolutely no guarantee you’ll ever manage to do it again. But then perhaps you find that you do do it again, the next day, or a few days later, and maybe again, and again – until before you know it, you’ve developed that most remarkable thing, not a willpower-driven system or routine but an emergent practice of writing, or meditating, or listening to your kids, or building a business. Something you do not solely to become a better sort of person – though it may have that effect, too – but because whatever you’re bringing into reality, right here on the rapids, is worth bringing into reality for itself.
‘You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.’ – SHELDON B. KOPP
The conservative American economist Thomas Sowell summed things up with a bleakness I appreciate, insisting that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying. This can come as a revelation and a liberation to the anxious among us – partly because it cuts genuinely agonizing choices down to a more manageable number, but also because it reminds us that most of the potential consequences we find ourselves agonizing about don’t remotely justify such angst. If ignoring an email causes its sender a flicker of irritation, or if your in-laws frown at your approach to parenting, the correct response might very well be: So what? Laura Vanderkam, who has interviewed many working mothers for books on how to manage work and family life, frequently hears versions of the same refrain: ‘I can’t relax in the evening until the children’s toys are tidied away!’ But the reality, of course, is that you absolutely can relax with the toys not tidied away. ‘There is no 11 p.m. home inspection, with someone coming round to see if all the toys are picked up,’ notes Vanderkam. You need only be willing to pay the price of relaxing in such circumstances, which is a less-than-pristine home.
each choice is always and only a matter of weighing the trade-offs. If a path you’d love to take is genuinely likely to leave you destitute, or seriously harmed in some other way, then you probably shouldn’t take it. But for most of us, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves the burden of making a bold choice. (It’s a particular peril among the progressive-minded, I’ve noticed, to take the fact that a given choice might be unfeasible for the underprivileged as a reason not to make it yourself. But unless it’s you who’s underprivileged, that’s an alibi, not an argument.) It was a central insight of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that there’s a secret comfort in telling yourself you’ve got no options, because it’s easier to wallow in the ‘bad faith’ of believing yourself trapped than to face the dizzying responsibilities of your freedom.
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. If this describes you, there’s a good chance that like me you belong to the gloomy bunch psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers,’ which is a diplomatic way of saying that our accomplishments, impressive as they may sometimes be, are driven ultimately by feelings of inadequacy
But we overlay this everyday sense of obligation with the existential duty described above: the feeling that we need to get things done not only to achieve certain ends, or to meet our basic responsibilities to others, but because it’s a cosmic debt we’ve somehow incurred in exchange for being alive. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written, ‘we produce against the feeling of lack.’ Our frenetic activity is often an effort to shore up a sense of ourselves as minimally acceptable members of society.
You just do exist, and that has to be sufficient. As the Taoist writer Jason Gregory explains, expressing the same idea in a different and powerful way, we fall into the error of believing that we somehow don’t belong to the world, and must therefore spend our lives trying to earn back the right to belong. But who could ever decide we don’t belong? The obvious truth is that we already do. This isn’t sentimentalism, just a hard-nosed statement of the facts. Look around: this is reality. It consists of a whole lot of atoms, a few of which constitute you. What could it even mean to say you don’t belong?
My favorite way of combating the feeling of productivity debt in everyday life is to keep a ‘done list,’ which you use to create a record not of the tasks you plan to carry out, but of the ones you’ve completed so far today – which makes it the rare kind of list that’s actually supposed to get longer as the day goes on.
As Marie Curie understood, our default stance is to measure our actual accomplishments against all the things we could, in principle, still do. But that’s a yardstick against which we’re doomed to find ourselves perpetually wanting. By contrast, what makes a done list so motivating and encouraging is that it implicitly invites you to compare your output to the hypothetical situation in which you stayed in bed and did nothing at all. And what makes that comparison any less legitimate than the other one?
A done list isn’t solely a way to feel better about yourself, though. 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’ll 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. And while I’m not going to pretend it happens all the time, you might even experience a few of those transcendent moments in which taking action on a project you care about – now that it’s no longer serving the hidden agenda of making you feel better about yourself by helping you repay an imaginary debt – becomes utterly effortless and joyful.
Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: 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. In any case, when you stop to think about it, there’s something slightly arbitrary about which repositories of information we define as guilt-inducing buckets in the first place. I know several older people who appear to believe that if a physical newspaper or magazine makes its way into their home, they have a moral duty to read it. I’ve felt similarly tormented by long lists of web-browser bookmarks. Yet none of us seems remotely bothered that we’ll never make it through the 25 million books currently held by the Library of Congress. (They’re housed, along with other printed matter, on more than 800 miles of shelves.) Clearly, the mere existence of something readable creates no obligation to read it – and nor does the fact that it’s entered your awareness, your web browser, or your home. The second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge. At least where non-fiction sources are concerned, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get to take advantage of it all. (This attitude prompts some people to develop complicated systems for taking notes on everything they read, which turns reading into a chore, which then perversely leads to their not reading books they’d otherwise enjoy or benefit from, because they can’t face taking the notes.) 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 work and good ideas will later flow. ‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.’ The closely related final rule is to remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else. It’s not merely that a fixation on retaining facts is a poor way to reap the benefits of reading. It’s also that any focus on ‘reaping the benefits’ risks obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now. So you needn’t always choose to read what’s most edifying, or professionally useful, or most enthusiastically endorsed by the arbiters of culture. Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future – though it might do that too – but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.
‘The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.’ – WILLIAM JAMES
In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.
The main way we try to resist this horrifying state of affairs is by worrying. What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross it? The compulsive and repetitious character of worry arises from the fact that for finite humans, this goal is doubly impossible. Firstly, we can’t possibly think of every challenge we might end up facing. Secondly, even if we could, the solace we crave could only come from knowing we’d made it safely over the bridges in question – which we can’t ever know until we’ve actually crossed them. Thus, as Hannah Arendt writes, ‘constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.’
As the celebrated Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius reassures readers of his Meditations: ‘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.’ You could say the worrier gets things exactly backwards. He’s so terrified that he might not be able to rely on his inner resources, later on, when he reaches a bridge that needs crossing, that he makes superhuman efforts to bring the future under his control right now. In fact he should devote less energy to manipulating the future, and have more faith in his capacity to handle things once the challenge actually arrives. If it arrives, that is. Marcus’s phrase ‘if you have to’ is a useful reminder that most of the bridges we worry about never end up needing to be crossed at all.
your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can.
It would be easy to misinterpret the shrubbery tale as Jung succumbing to parental pressure, or finally submitting to the societal message that hard work is always a virtue (a message that was as popular as you might imagine in his nineteenth-century Swiss Protestant milieu). But that’s not what Jungians mean by a life task. By definition, a life task is something your life is asking of you; so while it might coincide with your parents’ expectations, or your society’s ideals, it also very easily might not. As it happens, Jung’s moment of insight propelled him in the direction his father also wished him to go. Yet stepping up to a life task might just as easily mean resisting expectations instead. Sometimes what’s called for isn’t buckling down to your studies, but dropping out of college.
I talked about it with J, the man I live with, and he suggested three hours. Three hours! The very thought gave me an anxiety attack. How about two hours? Two hours! The very thought … One hour? More reasonable, but still not possible. Half an hour? Getting closer but still too much. Fifteen minutes? Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. Now there was a figure I could imagine. A nice solid amount of time, an amount of time I knew I could live through every day. People laughed when Valian told them of her fifteen-minute-a-day plan, because it sounded pathetic. In fact it was the opposite. Asking yourself what it would actually entail to befriend the gnawing rats in your life is an act requiring real courage – more courage, perhaps, than the standard confrontational approach, which feels less like reconciling yourself to reality and more like getting into a bar fight with it. Befriending your rats is a gentle strategy, but there’s nothing submissive about it. It’s a pragmatic way to maximize your room for maneuver, and your capacity to make progress on the work you care about, by becoming ever more willing to acknowledge that things are as they are, whether you like it or not.
‘If you’re a runner and you want to be a better runner, you say, well, I’ll run every day, and I’ll mark an X on the calendar every day I run! I can’t believe this was useful information to anybody. Really? There are people who think “I’ll just sit around and do absolutely nothing, and somehow the work will get done”?’ In the world of personal productivity advice, the Seinfeld Strategy had come to refer to the idea that you should work on your main project, every single day, without fail. But the actual Seinfeld’s position was just the obvious one that if you want to get good at something, you should do it a lot, preferably more days than not. A much better rule – indeed, one I think more accurately reflects Seinfeld’s approach to his work – is to do things dailyish.
‘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 favor of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete, imperfect progress, here and now. In any case, ‘dailyish’ isn’t synonymous with ‘just do it whenever you feel like it.’ Deep down, you know that doing something twice per week doesn’t qualify as dailyish, while five times per week does, and in busy periods, three or four times per week might get to count. So you’re still putting some pressure on yourself. But, crucially, what you’re not doing is expecting the rule to somehow force the action.
Maybe you’re a self-punishing perfectionist, who demands from yourself a flawless track record, so you want a rule to help ensure you never put a foot wrong. Or maybe you don’t really want to do your work at all, but you just think that you ought to want to do it, so you’re seeking a system to try to force the missing desire into existence. We want a rule to shoulder the burden of living on our behalf. It’s a quid pro quo: we’ll follow it religiously and, in return, won’t have to take so much moment-to-moment responsibility for making the most of our lives.
the Rule of Saint Benedict, the one he wrote in old age and which is still in use, remains relevant because it’s a model of moderation, elegantly balancing the need for order with the need for individual freedom, and a monk’s need for solitude with the universal human need for a social life. It also recognizes, in the beautifully forbearing passage quoted above, that monks, like many of the rest of us, enjoy a drink from time to time. Sometime in the aftermath of those poisonings, Benedict apparently understood that the point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for the rules to serve life.
The monks’ daily work period ends at 12.40 p.m. (and no prizes for guessing when it begins: about three hours earlier). Malesic writes: I asked Father Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defense attorney, what you do when the 12.40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone. ‘You get over it,’ he replied.
‘problem’ is just the word we apply to any situation in which we confront the limits of our capacity to control how things unfold. (We might triumph over any given problem, of course; but if we had total control, we’d never confront them in the first place.) It takes only a little further reflection to see that we wouldn’t really want life to be otherwise. It would be nice to be able to skip the scariest or most overwhelming problems. 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.
I no longer have to remain in the posture – absurd for finite humans, for whom time is so precious – of trying to get the present out of the way, en route to the problem-free future. And I am free to aspire not to a life without problems, but to a life of ever more interesting and absorbing ones.
A friend of mine vividly recalls the uplifting and energizing moment when, feeling burdened like Harris by the endless problems that seemed to get in the way of her doing her job, it dawned on her that the problems were the job. Anyone, or a piece of software, could do her job, if it weren’t for the problems. Her unique contribution lay in her capacity for solving them.
And so instead of asking how to summon the energy or motivation or self-discipline to do something that matters to you, it’s often more helpful to ask: What if this might be a lot easier than I’d been assuming? Ironically, this isn’t generally an easy question to bring yourself to ask. It feels like cheating; or else it seems obvious to you that the output you’d produce, were you to approach life in this manner, would lack value. So it takes guts: you have to ‘be willing to let it be easy,’ as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it. Certainly, many tasks and situations are legitimately difficult in themselves, even distressing. The point isn’t to deny that reality, but to avoid worsening it – and specifically not to turn the fact that life can be difficult into a judgment of inadequacy on your part. The entrepreneur and podcaster Tim Ferriss phrases the question slightly differently: ‘What would this look like if this were easy?’ That puts the focus on specifics, on actions you could undertake – and of course the idea isn’t to imagine some parallel dimension in which a task might be easy, but to permit yourself to consider the possibility that it might in fact be easy in this one. The New Age author Julia Rogers Hamrick once wrote a book, Choosing Easy World, in which she argues it’s as simple as repeating a mantra: ‘I choose to live in Easy World, where everything is easy.’ When some daunting challenge barrels into view, just decide that you’re going to experience it as easy instead. I realize that sounds like the worst kind of denial of human limitation, as if you could get your way merely by commanding the universe to fall in line with your desires. In fact, though, it can be surprisingly effective – because it functions not as a mystical command to the universe but as a reminder to yourself not to fall into the old habit of adding complications or feelings of unpleasant exertion where neither need exist.
That was the kind of person I wanted to be: the kind that just got on with things, regardless of how inspired or fired up I happened to feel.
I discovered a blog post, by the meditation teacher Susan Piver, that helped me understand why. Honestly, the title was enough. It was ‘Getting stuff done by not being mean to yourself.’
‘reverse golden rule’ – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else.
This is why I can wholeheartedly recommend a personal policy I learned from the (vastly less problematic) meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, and that I seek to follow myself, which is to act on a generous impulse the moment it arises. The point isn’t to try to render yourself more generous than you already are, but just to notice the moments when you naturally and effortlessly feel that way anyway, then not to screw it up with overthinking. The simplest way to do that is to move fast. ‘Each time the thought to give arises, act on it. Then notice what happens,’ Goldstein counsels, adding that ‘in my experience, generosity never leads to remorse.’ What happens, unsurprisingly, is that it feels great, so while initiating the practice can require a little willpower, it soon becomes self-reinforcing. Before you know it, you’re a person who acts more generously – without ever having had to become a more generous person.
only someone with morals can beat themselves up for lacking morals.
What I eventually figured out – not that it ever seems to get particularly easy – is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs 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.
‘It’s weird how when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy,’ observes the novelist Leila Sales, poking fun at this tendency in herself, ‘but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.’
One of the main reasons we fail to treat other people’s 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. It might help to consider the billions of people on earth who are, at this moment, feeling angry, depressed, disappointed, impatient, or anxious. The thought of them might evoke your sympathy; yet you surely don’t see it as your job to cheer them all up. Why should it automatically be different in that small proportion of cases where the emotions are, at least nominally, about you?
It helped me see that if trying so hard to manage other people’s emotions wasn’t even helping them, I had less to lose by abandoning the endeavor. And so I began to grapple with a truth that people-pleasers are prone to resist until it halfway kills them: that very often, the best way to benefit others is to focus on doing your thing.
One more paradoxical truth about control: often, the way to have the best ideas, and to produce the best work, is to develop an ability to forget entirely about trying to control the quality of your output. And the easiest way to do that is to focus on quantity instead.
What if you can’t think of ten? ‘Here’s the magic trick: if you can’t come up with ten ideas, come up with twenty ideas.’ Quantity overpowers perfectionism, as Altucher explains: ‘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 ideas.’ A quantity goal puts you back in the driver’s seat: instead of hoping you produce something good, you get to know you’ll produce something.
‘Getting lost and distracted in this way is what life is for,’ Tarrant writes. Looking at things from this angle, you might even argue that what makes modern digital distraction so pernicious isn’t the way it disrupts attention, but the fact that it holds it, with content algorithmically engineered to compel people for hours, thereby rendering them less available for the serendipitous and fruitful kind of distraction.
once your focus has already been diverted – once the child has burst into the room, or the anxious thought about the timing of your doctor’s appointment has pulled you away from the novel you were reading – don’t fight the fact. Deal with your new reality instead. Make a note to check the time of the appointment; or look the child in the eyes, listen to their request – then either close your laptop to be with them, or explain you’ll need to finish what you’re doing first. It’s entirely possible, Loomans notes, ‘to give someone your undivided attention while telling them you don’t have time right now,’ and far more pleasant for all involved than attempting to keep part of your focus on whatever it was you were just doing. When you try that, ‘you get tense and the other person doesn’t feel heard. They might even stay longer and keep pressing their point.’
The signature behavior of the operator-from-sanity, by contrast, is what the creativity coach Jessica Abel calls ‘paying yourself first with time’: spending a little time on what matters to you most immediately, instead of waiting, because you understand that even thirty minutes spent Actually Doing the Thing today are more valuable than hundreds of purely hypothetical hours in the future.
Free up time by renegotiating existing commitments, not just planning to make fewer. If what stands between you and peace of mind is a whole lot of commitments you wish you’d never made, striving towards sanity would involve attempting to meet them all, while firmly resolving to make fewer new commitments from here on. (Spoiler alert: you’ll make just as many as before.) Operating from sanity, in this case, means biting the bullet and renegotiating some of the commitments that are already on your plate: backing out of projects, requesting deadline extensions, or canceling social plans, so as to reduce the real, current demands on your time, not just hypothetical demands on it later.
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.
‘A perfectly kept house is the sign of a misspent life.’ – MARY RANDOLPH CARTER
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.
Knowing that I needn’t project a facade of flawless competence before I can start daunting work or reach out to others – because I understand that everyone else has a similarly messy inner world – leaves me far more likely to do so. Moreover, something about the fact that we’re all in the same predicament leaves me feeling supported by others in what I do, rather than engaged in stress-inducing, zero-sum competition against them. Our days become an extended exercise in mutual scruffy hospitality – a dinner party in which we’re all cooking for each other, and nobody’s pretending it’s anything fancier than spaghetti with tomato sauce, and the lack of pretense is exactly what makes it feel so convivial and full of life.
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. Another version of the same phenomenon occurs when you reach the end of a day on which you’ve been unusually successful in getting your work done, or sticking to your fitness routine, but then instead of thinking ‘What a great day!’ and luxuriating in your achievement, you find yourself thinking: ‘Yes! Now that’s the kind of day I’m aiming for, and now it’s my job to make sure that this is merely the first of many such days to come!’ Congratulations: you turned a potential source of easy delight into a cause of further stress.
You get to proceed in the splendidly imperfectionist spirit of the eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen, who says: ‘The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done.’ 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.
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.