Embracing Our Limitations and Making Time for What Counts

Oliver Burkeman: If you think that it’s going to be really hard to get the experience and the confidence that you need to not feel like you’re winging it, that’s an agonizing way to live. If you understand that basically everybody’s winging it and that you’re never going to get to that point, it’s freeing and it’s energizing because now you can do the things that you’ve been postponing until then.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host  Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard Oliver Burkeman. Oliver is an author and journalist based in northern England. In his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, he lays out a practical guide for living a meaningful and fulfilling life as finite, imperfect humans. In our conversation with Oliver, we talk about what we gain by letting go of the delusion that life is something we have to solve, how our attempts at avoiding our anxieties often backfire, and why everything is much worse than we think—and why that’s OK. So here’s our conversation with Oliver Burkeman.

James Shaheen: So, I’m here with Oliver Burkeman and my co host Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Oliver. Hi, Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Sharon Salzberg: Hi.

Oliver Burkeman: Hi, likewise.

James Shaheen: So, Oliver, we’re here to talk about your new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. So, to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Oliver Burkeman: Sure. I’m especially interested to be talking with you two about it because a number of people have assumed it must be about meditation in the seated and formal sense, but actually the mantle that I’m arrogantly assuming is not the Buddha’s but Marcus Aurelius’s. A while ago, I wrote a book called Four Thousand Weeks about coming to terms with what it means to be finite in the context of how busy and overwhelmed and stressed and distracted we, or most of us anyway, feel most of the time. In the conversations that I had after that book was published, I came to realize that I was not the only person who was capable of having quite powerful insights about how they wanted to show up for life and the things they wanted to focus on and how they wanted to be but then just not actually do them at all, for there to be this big gap between knowing and doing. And so this book came from wanting to really kind of get into that idea, which I think is also one that is to do with how resistant we are to acknowledging our limitations and our finitude in various ways, and so both the content and also the structure of the book, which we could talk about if you want, is intended to be something that could help readers but also me in the writing of it actually take away the blockages that always seem to throw themselves up between fine notions of how to be in the world and actually doing it.

James Shaheen: Yeah, so you’re including yourself here, and in fact, you say that you wrote the book in part for yourself. So was it a helpful exercise to you in doing precisely what the book sets out to do?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I think so. I mean, don’t you think this is true of any book that purports to offer advice or wisdom, if I can even go that far? It’s not even something to be embarrassed about. I would only really want to read that kind of writing from somebody who until quite recently or maybe still now had struggled with the things that they’re writing about. So yeah, absolutely. I think specifically for me, it was the coming into focus of this sense that I had had for a huge proportion of my adulthood, certainly, and probably before that, of being on the back foot, the sense that maybe soon, with a bit more discipline or the right system or the right meditation practice or who knows what, I would get myself to the place where I was finally on top of life and finally in control and finally knowing what the heck I was doing. And I think that some version of that fantasy is a big part of what I’m writing about. But that was how it manifested for me. So I was wondering what lay on the other side of that, which, maybe when you’re 19, you can tell yourself that the moment in your life when you’re going to be on top of everything is coming soon, but it gets less and less credible the older you get, basically.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I’ve never been able to take full control, and in fact, that’s in many ways what the book is about. Nobody can. But in some ways, the book is an anti-self-help book. You write that the book is about how the world opens up once you realize that you’re never going to sort your life out. So can you say more about this? What do we gain by letting go of the delusion that life is something that we have to try to solve or control?

Oliver Burkeman: I think there are lots and lots of ways into this topic, but I think that a huge amount of self-help, not all of it at all, but the conventional approach to self-help fuels the problem here because it really suggests that by following certain protocols or rules or whatever, you can become the kind of person who, whatever it is, never procrastinates, or always follows healthy habits during the course of every day, or focuses relentlessly on their goals. You can embark on this big project of transforming your life. But this can actually be an obstacle to just allowing yourself to do the thing, you know, to spend ten minutes today working on the creative project that brings you alive, or to spend ten minutes today nurturing the relationship that you’ve been neglecting. There’s a sense in which these big projects of life transformation are a kind of a distraction or a form of avoidance from just showing up more completely in the moment. And so I think that that feeling of “I’m waiting to feel ready to do something, I’m in the process of getting to the point where I’ll be able to feel secure and everything will be plain sailing and my problems will be solved,” it lends the present moment a provisionality and also causes you to want to get it out of the way, which is an absurd thing for finite mortal humans to want to do, to see time is so precious and then be constantly trying to get the current bit of it out of the way.

Sharon Salzberg: I certainly relate to the idea that an author is actually writing for themselves in some exploration rather than imparting their vast expertise, so that I think is certainly true for me. So you describe your approach as imperfectionism, a freeing and energizing outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence. So can you tell us more about imperfectionism as an outlook and vision? How can it be liberating?

Oliver Burkeman: Sure. Yeah, I mean I suppose I’m characterizing all these different ways of trying to get into control over reality as varieties of perfectionism, so not just the classic kind of wanting to produce perfect work, perfectionism. I think people-pleasing is a form of perfectionism in this sense, wanting to exert perfect control over how people are responding to you. I think there are lots of other examples. Wanting to feel ready and not like an imposter is a kind of a perfectionism. And so imperfectionism is just the approach that opposes all that perfectionism. It asks, what if we started from the acceptance that there will always be too much to do, more meaningful things to spend our time on than we will get time for? What if we started from the perspective that the future was always going to be in some sense radically unknowable? What if we started from the assumption that any new venture or life stage you’re never going to feel ready for, almost by definition, because you’re just right here in the present and it’s a new thing?

I think that that is not only consoling and a relief to accept but also really quite energizing and productivity-focused in a way. I think something I’m always trying to do, and this is probably because I’m trying to resolve things in myself on some level, is to bring together the kind of promise of a peaceful, calm existence and rescue some notion of wanting to be ambitious, wanting to do stuff, wanting to accomplish things in the world, but not out of some kind of insecurity and desperate need to get into control, but just because it’s fun to do that. So I do actually think that when you let go, or to the extent that one can let go, of trying to fit everything in, trying to know with absolute confidence what the future holds, trying to feel completely ready, all of these things, once you can let go of that, you are actually freer to take action and do stuff with this attitude that a writer who I quote in the book, Sasha Chapin, calls playing in the ruins, which I think is a brilliant phrase, the ruins of your fantasies for how life should be. Once they’re just ruins and there’s no chance of maintaining them anymore, it’s very freeing.

James Shaheen: Oliver, you structure the book as a four-week “retreat of the mind” in the midst of daily life. Can you say more about this structure? What do you mean by retreat of the mind?

Oliver Burkeman: The idea here was that I didn’t want to write a book that would fall into the trap that I was writing about. So I didn’t want it to be a book where someone might read it and even if they liked it, they might think, “Cool, great system. When I get a free week, I’m going to really put it into practice and change everything around here,” because I don’t know about you, but I don’t think free weeks ever arrive. So I wanted it to be something that I guess I’m thinking of the idea that by reading a chapter a day, there are very short chapters, twenty-eight days, four weeks of them. If you follow something roughly like that, you could nurture a place in the back of your mind, I suppose, where a different way of engaging with the world could be developed, but right in the thick of having too many emails and being overscheduled and right in the thick of not yet having solved your terrible problem with procrastination or distraction or whatever it. I really wanted to do something that could have a chance of taking root right there in the middle of it. So that’s the notion of a retreat of the mind: There’s a sort of a retreating, but while not having to go somewhere and find the time to press pause on the rest of your life.

Sharon Salzberg: I think it’s fantastic, even though I am the cofounder of a retreat center.

Oliver Burkeman: Right, retreat of the mind and body.

James Shaheen: Well, I have to say, Oliver, when I picked up your book, it was sitting on a stack of other books on my desk, and I read, “Read this over twenty-eight days,” and I thought, “Twenty-eight days, I have a podcast to do next week.” So I fell into the very state of mind that you address so powerfully in your book. 

Oliver Burkeman: I feel like you’re excused if it’s so that we can talk to each other.

James Shaheen: Yeah, well, I’m sure I can read a chapter a day over twenty-eight days. I mean, actually, it’s very doable if you commit to doing that. By the time I picked it up, I had only a week, but it was nonetheless worth it. But you begin the four-week retreat, which I did in one week, by saying that the most empowering step you can take in living more meaningfully is to realize that life is much worse than you think, which made me laugh when I looked at that stack of books. So, go ahead and tell us how what may seem so counterintuitive or even counterproductive can, in fact, be so helpful.

Oliver Burkeman: This has just been a really big insight for me personally. Very often, the sort of freedom and path forward emerges not from trying to convince yourself that things are more OK than you thought but really from going all the way through into how bad they might be. So just as an example, in the context of busyness, which, because I’m writing about time and all the rest of it is, comes up all the time, it’s very easy to think that getting on top of everything that you need to do is very, very difficult and takes a lot of effort and is going to be a lot of work in order to do it. And there are quite a few people out there offering advice saying, “Well, actually, it’s not quite so difficult. Use these systems and then you can do it by an easier route.” I think it’s more useful and truer to say, well, no, it’s not really difficult; it’s impossible. And in that transition from really difficult to impossible, for me, anyway, there is a real lifting of a weight, because then it’s like, “Oh, right. This is the situation. This is where we are.”, I think it’s the same with another example I’ve already mentioned, imposter syndrome. If you think that it’s going to be really hard to get the experience and the confidence that you need to not feel like you’re winging it, that’s an agonizing way to live. If you understand that basically everybody’s winging it and that you’re never going to get to that point, it’s freeing and it’s energizing because now you can do the things that you’ve been postponing until then.

I mean, for me, this is all encapsulated, and I’d love to know from some people with more Buddhist qualifications, if that’s the right word, than me, what you make of this. But I quote in the book and I quote everywhere this line that I encountered about the Zen teacher Houn Jiyu-Kennett, that her preferred method of teaching was not to lighten the burden of the student but to make it so heavy that he or she will put it down. And I don’t know if she meant what I think she meant by that or what I think that means, but to this day, I just get shivers repeating that, because for me, there’s something so deep and true in that idea that it’s when you stop trying to make this situation OK in all the ways that I wrongly think it needs to be made OK that I can actually come to grips with it and do so in a much lighter spirit.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you very nicely put it as the liberation of defeat. There’s a kind of sweet surrender there that allows one to relax a bit and do the next thing. You also quote the Zen teacher Mel Weitsman, who died a few years ago, who says that our real problem is believing there’s a way out—in other words, the illusion that we can escape the facts of the human condition. Can you say more about that?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if this is right, but it feels like this is a very specifically Zen thing, these observations about how life is not a problem to be solved, or rather that because it’s a problem that can’t be solved, there’s a kind of freedom in letting go of the search for a solution. The other line, and I used this as an epigraph at the beginning of my previous book, from Joko Beck was, “What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured,” which I think is just an absolutely brilliant way of putting it. So yeah, I think that on some level, what we’re trying to do, or those of us with my particular set of screw-ups are trying to do, is to get out from under life or renegotiate the terms and conditions of the human situation in a way, and at the most fundamental level, that’s not going to happen. There’s all sorts of opportunities for growth and transformation and doing astounding things and inventing things and making scientific breakthroughs, but the basic sense in which we’re just thrown here into our finite lives with death certain but its timing unknowable with no ability to be in more than a single place at a time and all of that, that’s just how it is. And I think that a lot of where we go wrong with time can be explained as an attempt to try to lever ourselves  out of that somehow. And so thinking there’s a way out is the problem rather than our failure to have yet to discover the way out.

Sharon Salzberg: Another question, Oliver. You quote the Buddhist author and activist Joanna Macy, who defines action as something that we are. As she writes, the work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. So what does it mean to view action as something that we are? And how does it change our approach to action when we think of it as a form of coming alive?

Oliver Burkeman: I think that there’s a prevalent notion of what action is, especially in the personal development world, and it has some physiological rationale. It’s not nonsense, but it’s very widespread that one’s default state, if you didn’t push yourself and try to gin yourself up all the time to act, would be just passivity.

It would be not participating in the world. It would be laziness. And my experience has always been that that’s not how it works at all, that actually these attempts to motivate yourself in the manner of classic cliched motivational speakers backfire pretty easily, and that usually when I fail to do something that I believe I really want to do and have the time to do, it’s because I’m getting in my own way with some version of perfectionism broadly defined.

And so the third week of the book called “Letting Go” is really exploring this idea that actually a lot of action is about letting things happen, and there’s that wonderful quote that I use from Kosho Uchiyama who says, if I get this right, life unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity, some notion that actually our default state is just to let action flow through us and, as in Joanna Macy’s sense, perhaps as us and that really the problem is that we stand in its way or inhibit ourselves rather than that we need a big kick in the backside to do more of it. That just feels true to me, true to life. It feels like I don’t quite know what it would mean to not do anything anyway, right? You’re always doing something. This puts me on a collision course with that popular phrase, or at least with some interpretations of it, about how we’re not human doings, we’re human beings, that people like to say. And I want to say, well, yeah, if the point of that is to say we shouldn’t always be trying to make our sense of acceptability and enjoyment and pleasure in the world dependent on our output and our productivity, then totally. But in another sense, action and doing is the only way in which we show up for the world. It’s just a question of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

Sharon Salzberg: So you recommend reflecting on our life’s task, which means asking what life is asking of us. Can you say more about this question? What does it mean for life to want something from us?

Oliver Burkeman: This is this great idea that occurs like so many of these in the work of Carl Jung and then gets adapted, including by me. He tells this anecdote when he was 12 or so, and he’s hiding in the shrubbery of his family home. He’s been off school for six months with some mysterious fainting spells that no one can really explain, and he overhears his father telling a family friend, “Oh, it’s terrible. What will become of the lad? I’ve lost all the money I had, and if he can’t make something of himself, then he’s ruined.” Jung describes being thunderstruck by what he describes as a collision with reality, just realizing in that moment that actually whatever he felt like he wanted to do, life was demanding of him that he got on with his studies and running off to his father’s study and picking up the Latin grammar and getting on with it. I do not think that the lesson of that story is that you should always work hard or that you should always do what your parents want you to do in life. I think it is just that there can be moments, and maybe all moments are like this, if we look at them in the right way, when reality is asking something of you, it can actually be a way of turning things around that makes it a lot easier than fretting and worrying and getting confused about what you want to do with your life or the next portion of your life. I feel like I have encountered that in a context where it’s actually the opposite of getting down to work. It’s actually that life is asking you to work a bit less obsessively. But I just think it’s a lovely way of turning things around and freeing something up. Whether or not it’s true in some metaphysical sense that life can ask things of you, I’m not sure it matters. I just find it a really useful way of addressing things.

James Shaheen: What struck me about that was that he overheard something that changed his life, and I had to think back on how I remember overhearing things from time to time that I took to be truth and that changed my life. But it was very interesting that just hearing that without his father’s knowing completely changed the trajectory of his life. You know, you also describe our patterns of avoidance, and you note that the more we organize our lives around not addressing the things that make us anxious, the more likely those things are to develop into serious problems. So how do our attempts at avoiding our anxieties backfire? You say that we become defined by precisely what we want to avoid.

Oliver Burkeman: I think there are all sorts of contexts where precisely because it would be scary to take the action that would be most helpful to oneself or to other people, you don’t take that action and as a result, the problem risks getting worse. Classic examples are you’re worried that you have less money in the bank than you thought, so you just don’t check your bank balance, or you’re worried that a pain you’re experiencing might be something serious, so you never quite get around to getting it checked out. In both those cases, if there is a problem, confronting it is the first step to minimizing its impact, but we would rather avoid that.

I think there’s a fairly sound evolutionary argument for this that has to do with the fact that we evolved in contexts where there was a very quick feedback loop between feeling alarm about something and figuring out whether it was truly alarming. These days, we live in a more delayed return kind of environment where it’s possible to choose to ignore things for a long time in order to avoid anxiety, but it doesn’t make for a good situation. Either something bad happens with your finances or your physical health, or it doesn’t, and in a way that’s still bad because you’re still structuring your life around where you can’t go mentally, which is why I was so struck by the work of this Dutch Zen monk, Paul Loomans, who talks about the necessity in those cases of just making the very first mental gesture towards letting that thing into your reality, so maybe you can go and check your bank balance, but maybe you don’t have the nerve to do that just yet. Maybe it is literally imagining yourself going and checking your bank balance, something that sounds like how could that play a role? But as he points out, and I find this to be true, you are on some level acknowledging that it is a part of your reality and that actually you don’t have the power to make it not be a part of your reality, and the moment you’ve made any acknowledgment in that direction can be the beginning of a snowball effect toward facing things more fully.

Sharon Salzberg: So you say that the real challenge in building an accomplished and absorbing life is learning to be willing to get out of the way and let things happen. So why is this so hard?

Oliver Burkeman: I really think it is that desire for a sense of control and security that surely on some level comes from how uneasy we are with being mortal at all, with being aware of the fact that we’re not going to live forever. That fuels this desire manifested in all these tiny and big ways to run the show and feel like we’re in the driver’s seat or the air traffic control tower or whatever metaphor you want to use. And yet again and again, it is the case that actually our conscious minds and wills are not the right tools for the job. And so by investing completely in those for these emotional reasons, we deny ourselves the experiences of life we could have. There’s this lovely idea, which I write about from the German social theorist, Hartmut Rosa, who has this phrase “resonance” to describe the kind of the vibrancy, the thing in good experiences of life that makes them good and that we feel when we are doing things that we care about or with people we love or had one of those randomly great days that just occur even without planning. He points out brilliantly that as societies and as individuals, we’re kind of set up to try to control more and more and more of reality, but too much control of reality squeezes the resonance out. For life to feel worth living, you have to have a sense that you’re impacting it and you’re doing things and you have efficacy, but you don’t know how reality will respond to that. If you knew that your favorite soccer team was always going to win every game it played, there would just be no fun in being a follower of that team. And it probably goes all the way to you probably can’t experience the love of another person unless that’s given in some way that is beyond your control or certainty. And so I think that’s why we have to get progressively better, never perfect, at unclenching, relaxing that urge to stage manage life in that way.

James Shaheen: In fact, you just mentioned Hartmut Rosa. You also point out that he makes the observation that the more we try to control our lives, the more out of control it becomes. The whole project backfires.

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, this is another part of this vast thesis that he has, this sweeping thesis that he. We as societies try to control more and more. It doesn’t bring us what we want in a good life, but it also doesn’t actually even bring control. The story of the 20th and 21st century is the story of, for example, humanity gaining more and more control over the environment. And yet one way of describing what’s happening to our global environment now is that it’s getting more and more uncontrollable and slipping from our control. There’s another example, again, a very different level, but he talks about how if you know anybody who works in healthcare or education or government in different ways, you’ll find that they’re always complaining that they don’t have enough time to do their jobs anymore because of how much time they have to spend maintaining the processes by which bureaucracies get to control them and they do all the paperwork and make clear what they’re doing with their time and don’t get to do the things that that actually are the work, those unplanned spontaneous moments with with other people. So the more control a big bureaucracy like that gets over its people, the less in control of doing its work it becomes, and over and over again.

Sharon Salzberg: One aspect of getting out of our own way is not thwarting our impulses toward generosity, and to illustrate this, you talk about Joseph Goldstein’s advice to act on a generous impulse the moment it arises rather than turning generosity into an arduous project. Can you say more about this?

Oliver Burkeman: I certainly can. I think you know this fellow. I’ve really been changed, probably not as much as I could yet be changed, by this thought. I find it very powerful. He has said and written, I think, that one of his personal practices is to seek to act on generous impulses when they arise in him. What I find so insightful about this is there may be plenty of people in the world who are just kind of mean-spirited and horrible in some fundamental way. I know that’s not a very Buddhist thought, so let’s assume that there aren’t, but maybe there are. The point is, for myself, I don’t think that’s true of me. I think the reason I am not as generous a person as I might be is not because I don’t have the impulses. It’s because I throw up all sorts of obstacles to the impulses, and sometimes they’re very ironic impulses. You can have a thought that you really want to reach out and send a note to a friend, and then you can think, “Well, but I only want to do that when I’m fresh and have lots of energy and time to do it well, because it would be insulting to that friend to do it in a half-assed way.” So even then it’s like a good rationale on some level is preventing this good impulse. There is this sense in which our perfectionism about even making ourselves into good and generous people stops us from doing good and generous things, and there’s something so wonderfully unpressurizing about Joseph’s insight there, because it’s like, I don’t need to make myself into a better person, whatever that means, which is an incredibly difficult, long-term, guilt-filled project. I just need to get a little bit better at turning my naturally kind impulses into actually doing it.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, you say that we assume that the things that matter must take effort, yet this assumption isn’t necessarily based in reality. So what can we learn from asking ourselves, “What if this might be a lot easier than I’m assuming?”

Oliver Burkeman: This is a very pointed one for me, because for whatever reason, I certainly have this deeply conditioned sense that I think is quite widespread that things that matter are going to be difficult, they’re going to feel unpleasant, they’re going to be grueling in some sense, and it’s a measure of your virtue and your justification of your existence on the planet, really, that you’re the kind of person who can endure that kind of hard work.

The even worse flip side of that is the idea that if something feels like a lot of effort, it must’ve been worth doing. You get to the end of a day exhausted by all the stuff you’ve been doing and you pat yourself on the back for having got through so many things, but maybe they weren’t important things. Time and again, especially in creative work and writing, but really I think it’s all the way through life, one finds that if you can be willing to let it be easy, as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, that’s a scary thing to do on some level if you’re really conditioned in this attitude, but you find that actually it can flow without you. It doesn’t need you to push it along with a furrowed brow and tensed muscles and all the rest of it. It comes more naturally than that, and in a way that I’m not sure I even know how to express, even difficult things can be done easily or in a spirit of ease or a spirit of not adding extra grueling things to even a very genuinely difficult or painful situation out of some misguided notion that it makes me a better person to exert myself in that way.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, we can sometimes take a similar approach to distraction and put in grueling, arduous effort to get rid of distraction, but you also discuss the upsides of supposed interruptions and note that trying to eliminate distraction actually undermines our capacity to respond to reality as it is actually unfolding. So what can we learn from distraction?

Oliver Burkeman: I mean, I think this is a fascinating topic, and obviously it’s a big topic for anyone who meditates, this question of distraction, but to decide in advance that something that comes into your attentional field is bad and shouldn’t have done so, it’s the notion that you can know the future and that you know everything that is happening in an incredibly complex reality, and it also leads to the situation, especially if you’re the kind of person, and I have been, who tries to very rigidly schedule their whole day in order to be maximally productive and all the rest of it. You end up turning more things into unwelcome interruptions. I think I say this in the book, but if it’s an afternoon when I’m not on afterschool duty and I’m working in my home office and my 8-year-old son bursts into the room to tell me about something that he’s done at school that day, there may be situations in which I need to say to him, “Actually, I’m going to have to talk to you about this later,” but if my whole approach to scheduling my day has like deemed that hour to be a focus hour, and therefore it’s a huge problem that he came in, I’ve just taken a nice thing about life, one of the things life is meant to be about, and turned it into something unwanted. There’s a quote that I use, a lovely quote from C. S. Lewis, where he says that there’s a tendency to deem everything that happens to you as somehow kind of a distraction from your own or real life. And Lewis writes that of course, the truth is the distractions, the interruptions, are precisely real life, the life God is sending one day by day. I think that’s a really interesting thing to play with. I don’t think it means you should just be a doormat and let overbearing bosses and annoying colleagues interrupt you whenever they want, but I think it does mean we should question whether we really know what an unwelcome interruption is. And maybe that’s true of distractions as a meditation hindrance too. I don’t know. I will defer to you on that matter.

Sharon Salzberg: I think what you’re describing is a very subtle and even advanced meditation instruction. In the beginning, we don’t just watch or take in distraction; it takes in us, and we just get whipped around. But as you develop a little more concentration, it also is just the foundation for opening and paying attention. In a way, nothing is a distraction. Like, what is it a distraction from? You know, it’s just where we’re putting our attention. And so that is a kind of ultimate meditation instruction, so you wrote the advanced meditation book.

Oliver Burkeman: Brilliant.

James Shaheen: Oliver, you say that sometimes we can maintain a fantasy that we’re not yet in real life and that we treat our actual life as something to get through, until we arrive at a future point when life can really begin. I think again of Bruce Tift here. Can you say more about this? What does it mean for us to postpone our aliveness? Because, in fact, there is something very deadening about looking at life like something you have to get through in order to achieve some wonderful future.

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. There’s a wonderful passage on this from Marie-Louise von Franz, who was a student of Jung’s and then a big deal psychotherapist and writer in her own right, about this tendency to deem whatever is happening as not quite the real thing. And I think it makes perfect sense once you have fully adopted this notion that there’s a kind of control, a kind of knowledge, a kind of on-top-of-it-ness that you need to achieve in order to be able to relax into life, then for as long as you haven’t achieved it, life is going to feel provisional. Bruce Tift makes this wonderful point that there’s a payoff to this. If you’re still waiting until you’ve fixed a certain problem of yours or until the world situation has calmed down or until whatever it is, then that’s almost like a dispensation not to quite fully show up for life in the present because you’re saving yourself for the time when it’s really real life, and that’s quite comfortable, right? It feels nice in a way to be working toward the real thing, but there is a poignancy to it.

We all recognize the cliche of the person who’s waiting for their big break as a musician or something. There are cliched forms of this, and I think partly this is one of those insights that the further you make it through life, the more you have to confront because, as I was saying before, there’s a certain legitimacy in someone in their early twenties telling themselves that the main part of life is coming later because hopefully most of their life is ahead of them, but there’s an adjustment that one starts needing to make when you realize that it would be a little bit absurd, wouldn’t it, to get further and further into advanced old age and be telling yourself that all of this had been a lead-up to a small part at the end.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, in that light, you also discuss the dangers of clinging, where we try to hold on to good things and tighten around our experience, yet this rarely works, and it’s actually one of the causes of suffering. So how can we learn to let go of grasping and instead learn from life’s transience?

Oliver Burkeman: I love that Sharon Salzberg is asking me this question as if I would have something to say.

Sharon Salzberg: I love it too.

Oliver Burkeman: I feel humbled but also slightly stressed. What I will say is that what I’m writing about there, and I do think that Buddhism seems to me to be uniquely insightful on this in terms of the wisdom traditions that I have any understanding of, not just the ways in which we make ourselves miserable by wanting things we don’t have or by not wanting things that we do have but by trying to hold on more tightly to good things that we do have. So even getting what you want is not winning because depending on your attitude, then there is this desire either to hold onto it and guarantee that you don’t lose it, that’s one obvious version of this, or even maybe more subtly just to take ownership of it in a way that is not really in the human gift to do. So I write in the book about moving here where I’m speaking to you from in the North York Moors a few years ago, an utterly beautiful, bleak landscape that I’ve loved all my life, and getting up one winter morning and drinking coffee and looking at the pink sun come out over the snow and seeing the winter wildlife that you can occasionally see even in the depths of winter and actually feeling stressed by that experience because I was like, “This is the thing that I wanted, so now I’ve got to make sure firstly that I’m really enjoying it and secondly that I can be confident of many, many more such experiences into my future,” both of which are just terrible ways to be present in the moment, obviously. And so it leads you to this strange understanding that actually to really be more present and to treasure more the experiences of our lives, we actually have to, in some sense, kind of not value them so much. We have to be like, “This is it, and it’s lovely, and then it’ll be gone.” And it’s not a sad thing, or maybe it’s sad, but in a different way, that it will be gone. So I write in the book about the things people have said about the Japanese tea ceremony, the idea that it’s the very transience of that moment that makes it something to kind of honor and do meticulously and to be present for. And then you get into this feeling of not indignation or regret that life is transient but poignancy, that notion of sadness that brings you more deeply into life. I’m still not very good at this, but when I can do it, it’s the way to go. It’s the way to be in experiences and not to be trying to hoard them away.

James Shaheen: So, Oliver, you close the book with an anecdote about Rabbi Simcha Bunim, who carried two slips of paper in his pockets as reminders: “For my sake,” he writes, “the world was created,” and “I am but dust and ashes.” So we’ve got, “For my sake, the world was created” and “I am but dust and ashes.” Can you say more about these two sentiments? How can they help us, say, zoom out and take a broader perspective?

Oliver Burkeman: I wrote in my earlier book, Four Thousand Weeks, about what I called a bit facetiously cosmic insignificance therapy and the kind of Stoic-inspired benefits of really seeing what a small part of the process one is, both geographically in a moment in time and also through the eons of history. But there’s a perspective that that anecdote comes closest to illustrating that this can coexist at one and the same time with understanding what one does to be completely significant and not to be damaged in its significance just by the fact that in the scheme of things, it’s so small.

One way that I’ve seen this put very clearly is by the philosopher Iddo Landau, who asks why we are using a definition of a meaningful life that makes meaning dependent on being cosmically significant. What we all know, I think, from our day-to-day experience is that there could be all sorts of moments in life when you know you’re doing something meaningful and you know you’re in the right place at the right time, and it can be completely mundane.

It can be caring for an elderly relative. It can be the work of parenting. In many of those cases you can make a totally persuasive argument that the vast majority of humanity won’t care in a hundred years, but we know that that’s not the standard we’re really using in those moments. So I think it’s important, you can de-stress a lot by not thinking that your every move needs to be cosmically significant. You get to let go of worries when you realize that in a hundred years, or frankly, in my case, in one day, most of them won’t seem anywhere near as serious as they do now. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that what you’re doing doesn’t matter.

James Shaheen: Oliver, anything else before we close?

Oliver Burkeman: I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve really enjoyed this, and as I say, there were one or two people who, when I started mentioning this book before it was published, who assumed that it would be about meditation. My own personal track record is pretty imperfect when it comes to formal meditation. But I do think there’s a place where these two ideas of meditating and meditating on ideas, there’s a place in which they come together or overlap somehow, I think. So I’m really grateful for this opportunity to explore that.

James Shaheen: Oh, great. Well, Oliver Burkeman, thanks so much for joining. It’s been a great pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Meditation for Mortals, which is available now. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation, so I’ll hand this over to Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you. So let’s sit together just for a few minutes, practice some non-doing, and to begin with, let’s just sit. You can open your eyes or close them however you feel most at ease and listen to sound. It may be the sound of my voice. I’m calling in from Barre, Massachusetts, where it’s raining. I can hear the sound of the rainfall. There may be other sounds. And it’s a way of relaxing deep inside and allowing our experience to come and go. Of course, we like certain sounds and we don’t like others, but we don’t have to chase after them to hold on or push away. It’s like the sound just washes through you.

Bring your attention to the feeling of your body sitting, just whatever sensations you discover, and bring your attention to the feeling of your breath, just the normal natural breath. You can find the place where you experience it most distinctly, nostrils, chest, or abdomen. Find that place, bring your attention there, and just rest. Let’s see if you can feel one breath.

Without concern for what’s already gone by, without leaning forward for even the very next breath, just rest. Let sounds come and go, images come and go, thoughts, emotions, sensations, whatever it might be. You don’t have to follow after them. You don’t have to fight them. Recognize they’re arising, passing away, and just rest. Your attention on the feeling of the breath. One breath. And when you feel ready, you can open your eyes or lift your gaze and we’ll end the meditation.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Sharon, and thank you again, Oliver. It’s great to be with you both.

Oliver Burkeman: Likewise. Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Oliver Burkeman. To read an excerpt from Oliver’s book, visit tricycle.org. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!