Self-help books and advice gurus often promise big changes to revolutionise how you live your life, or push you to strive for perfection. But what if we accept the fact that we are mortal humans with a finite time on this Earth, with only so much ability to get things done - and if we place ourselves within that reality, is that when we can truly thrive?
This week, Francesca and Louise are talking about this philosophy with Oliver Burkeman, author of Meditations for Mortals, which explores why we are never going to sort our lives out, so it's time to work out how to succeed within our limitations.
A new version of Meditations for Mortals releases July 1st.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hi, I'm Francesca Rudkin and I'm Louise Area and this
is season four of our New Zealand Herald podcast The
Little Things.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
It is good to have you with us. In this podcast,
we talk to experts and find out all the little
things you need to know to improve all areas of
your life. But you know what, You're never going to
sort your life out. How's that to a positive tip
away to start a podcast?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Words, I love it, It's honest.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
It is not my line. It's the second line of
a book written by an author we've waited a long
time to bring you because he is in such high demand.
The first line is this is a book about how
the world opens up once you realize you're never going
to sort your life out. So it's actually we're not
taking a dark turn. It's actually a really positive statement.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
You know that The Little Things is dedicated to bring
you all the best information we have access to to
live a happy and healthy lifespan. But we don't live fever.
We are mortal and we're not going to get to
experience every little thing we may have on our mental list.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I don't know about you, but as I age, I've
found my mortality does creep into my thoughts more often
than it used to, And of course that comes with
those inevitable questions lou about what's the best way to
spend my time? And even when I come up with
the answer, I don't do it. I just stick with
a daily routine.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Well there's nothing wrong with the daily routine, but me too,
And honestly, I'd rather have that epiphany now than in
twenty years. And I'd say I've had that epiphany off
and on over the years. But like yourself, and and
then you do fall into sort of the same patterns.
A common time waster I'm guilty of is just simply
worrying about things, whether it's a kids, extended family, work, pets, health, wealth,
(01:44):
my kiwi sav.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I think that's perfectly normal.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
The pretty, you know, weird things that are going on
in the world right now. But our guess philosophy has
helped me gain some perspective around this and some other
habits I probably didn't even realize. We're like holding me
back from spending our limited time on the things I
really care about. Thank good, Yeah, are you any good? Francisco?
Being present in the moment, I have to work at it.
(02:11):
It doesn't matter. I've done mindfulness and I think there's
a lot to it, and there's elements of that I
really like. And that's the other thing I like from mindfulness.
You take what works for you and you can leave
the reason that's right. But I still have to work
really hard at it. Yeah, me too, remind myself occasionally. Yeah,
there's plenty of things to take us away from being
in the moment. I think everyone would agree. And the
other thing is, even in the face of all the
(02:34):
evidence in the world, I tend to think that I've
got more control over things than I really have. Are
you a control No?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But I know you like control.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
I do.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I mean we all like control. I like control because
I just know that things are done, and then you know,
things that's sort of done and taken care of and
things like that. But I'm getting loosive with the control
as I get older, because I'm a bit like, what
does it matter?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Well, I have a love hate relationship with it. I
agree with you, it does mean things just get done.
But also I get frustrated when I'm the one doing it,
when it's taking time away from me. So I think
that's one of the things that I've taken away from
this book as well. Do you have any existential crisis
about the about Mortelagy?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
I haven't. I never had never thought about it, and
then it was really weird. It's such a cliche. But
I hit fifty and I went, hang on, how much
more time have I got left? What do I want
to do with my life? I actually do have to
real with you. That don't last long because there's something
else to get all, you know. But I have been
surprised at how I went from never really thinking about
(03:41):
it to actually thinking about it a bit. I think
that could be a midlife thing. Well, it must be
my midlife thing for a certain even the food being
a cliche, but it is. It's a midlife crisis. We
know that there's probably hints I've gone and done pottery.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
We're finally doing my pottery courses. Cliche embracing cliche. Yeah,
And look, I think the other thing is too. We
need to be released from worrying or even thinking about
or aspiring all the time to do all every single
thing we always thought we might in a lifetime. I'm
really learning to let go of that stuff. Because that
was really interesting. You said to me the other day
(04:19):
when we're out on a walk or something.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
We're in the bush and he said to Yep, you know,
I'm really letting go of the stack that I might
not even do an iron Man, and I might not
get my pH d. And I'm just sort of walking
on going. I had no idea that these were your
that you had these sort of ambitions on your on
your bucket list. I suppose you had a list of
these things you can achieve. It's like, oh, I don't
think I knew that. I hadn't Tom either.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
It was when I was challenged to think what really matters,
and I went, ah, I probably have. It's more that
I've wasted time thinking should I do some more study,
should I try harder and do an iron Man, blah
blah blah instead of doing instead of doing it. And
I'm like, nah, And this is what one of the
big lessons that I love in this book is it's
(05:05):
time to stop planning to do something, thinking about doing something,
and actually just start it, just do it or not
or not. Because because after you sort of mention those things,
I was, oh, gosh, I don't I haven't really thought
about what it is I'm going to do you know
what I like to do and the rest of my
life and things like that, and then I mean, oh no,
(05:26):
now I'm just going to think about it for ten years.
And so that's one thing I've really taken from this
book is you know what you're quite keen to do.
So and Oliver uses an example and we'll probably talk
about this when we talk to him. He's the example
of a case. So you think you're going to pick
up meditation, so you think about doing that, and then
you get a book on it, and you read the
book on it, and then you kind of go about
doing it and realize two days later it was a
(05:48):
book that's not really me. Maybe I won't do it,
And all that time you spent thinking about it and
building up expectations before.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
You actually finally got around to doing it. Don't put
so much on it. Just try it one day.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Do it.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
You might not do it the next time, but you
might do the next day. Right, see how it goes.
It's not a big deal. But just stop them ruminating
over everything. Yeah, anyway, to bring his words to life,
Oliver Berkman is going to join us today. Oliver is
a British author and journalist. In twenty twenty one, he
published four thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals, and in
twenty twenty four he followed it up with Meditation for Mortals,
(06:21):
four Weeks to Embrace your limitations and make time for
what counts. Despite the title, he is unfazed by how
long it takes you or how you read this book.
It's simply an aid to a saner and freer life,
served in bite sized chapters, and who of us would
not benefit from that? These days, Oliver has a way
of bringing our mortality home to us in a way
(06:42):
that is genuinely liberating and far from depressing. So we're
as you're delighted to have Oliver with us now. Thank
you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Oliver, Thank you for inviting me so Oliver, the finite
nature of life is central, seems to me central to
your work. Many of us are too busy living to
think about it, or maybe we just don't want to
think about it. Why is it so important that we
acknowledge our mortality?
Speaker 4 (07:06):
I think that's a big question. I think that ultimately
it's sort of it's at the core of sort of
almost everything that causes us stress, causes us anxiety causes
us to not be as fully present for a vibrant
life than we as we might be. Is this desire
to not feel too intensely what it is to be
(07:32):
a finite human. It's not so much about thinking every
day about the end and about death. I mean, I
don't really end up writing all that much about death
and dying per se. It's much more for me the
idea of the sort of the discomfort that is involved
in just sort of having only so many hours in
(07:53):
the day, with an infinite number of things that feel
like they ought to be done in the day, having
only so much control over how time unfolds, or understanding
of what's going on in the world, and still having
to function, you know, in this intrinsically limited state. And
I think we do all sorts of things, including all
(08:14):
sorts of things about trying to sort of manage our
time supposedly well, that are actually serving the purpose of
helping us ignore these truths.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
One thing I love about the book is you've designed
the book to be read one chapter a day for
twenty eight days, or you know, however you want to
read the book, you can dip in and out of it,
which I still go back to and do Now, is
this to let each lesson sink in?
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (08:40):
I mean so, firstly, yes, it's certainly not a law
that you have to read a chapter a day for
twenty eight days in a book that is about releasing.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Some of our attempts to control life.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
I feel like it be hypocritical to be trying to control
how everybody read the book.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
You've got the book, it's your book, and you do
what you like.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
But the sort of idea that I was chasing there
is that I've always found with books of wisdom and
self help, advice, whatever the right phrase is thinking one
of two ways.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Either it's kind of a big perspective shift.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
That then fades away, or it's like a list of
tips to follow that kind of you never get around
to really making yourself follow because you don't understand the
emotional logic behind them. So I wanted to sort of
see if I could make a book that got the
best of both worlds here and kind of led people
through a series of very small perspective shifts of the
(09:34):
kind that would just sort of maybe hang around in
the back of their mind during the day that followed.
I didn't want this to be a book where you think, well,
this is kind of good. I'm going to put this
amazing new system into practice in a few months time
when I finally get a free week with nothing to do,
like because that never happens. So it's much more like
something I hope could sort of just slide in under
(09:57):
people's you know, right in the middle of too many I.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Do love that description of self help books because how often,
lou have you done that?
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Have you got one?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
You go, okay, just get me straight. I'm just going
to skip these chapters, just get me straight to the
list of what I need to do. But you've got
no background or context for it, and you go, just
get to tell me what I need to do, and
then all the end, as you say, quite often you
read a book and you might only come away with
one sort of you know, light bold moment.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
And whereas for me, each day I go, oh, that's
the one. That's the key one for me, and then
the next day, oh, that's the key one. But I
actually I haven't had a book for a long time
that's been quite so it's getting a bit ratty because
I'm just going in quite frequently back to things again
to either refresh my mind obviously I was doing some
(10:43):
research for this, but or to think that this is
something that's come up even in the family of something,
and I pull on that piece of wisdom for some
timely advice. But let's just clear this up at the outset.
You're not telling us through this to give up and
become unambitious and resign to a quiet, unfew full life.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Are you no quite the opposite?
Speaker 4 (11:03):
And I know you're asking that in a spirit of
devil's advocacy, but this has once or twice been leveled
at me, and I get quite defensive in response to it,
because I think in many ways, what I'm trying to
suggest is that it is only when we really sort
of get a bit better at embracing limitation and acknowledging
(11:24):
the way that the ways in which we're limited, that
you are then freed up to really like take the
ambitious actions, do the things that count. It's like it's
when you realize that the moment in the future when
you finally feel in control of everything, on top of everything,
it's when you finally realize that's never coming that you think, well, okay,
(11:45):
I might as well take action on these things.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Right now. I think part of what I'm.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Doing here just as a sort of personal project, is
trying to is trying to explore the possibility it might
be possible to live a sort of less anxious, more
peaceful life and also a very sort of active and
ambitious one. I think mainly just because like I want
both those things in my life.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
So yeah, I remember when I practiced, when I first
out of practice mindfulness, mindfulness, and I came home I
discussed it with the family and said, you know, just
it's not about striving, it's not a bit and they
were like, well, how can I how can life be
bitter if you stop striving? You know? So I get
what you mean having leave it at you. But that's
(12:32):
that's like you say, it's actually the complete opposite.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
Well, and I think an important point here that that
the word striving specifically reminds me of as well, is
it's like, why are you taking action? And a lot
of us, and certainly me historically and to some extent
still today, are what the psychologists call insecure overchievers. Right,
we do lots of stuff and it all that's great,
(12:57):
and we sort of put ourselves out there, but on
some level we're doing that because we feel like if
we don't do it, we don't get to count as
adequate human beings. So you're constantly trying to sort of
earn your place on the planet. And the wonderful thing
at least to aspire to, I think is the is
(13:19):
the state of affairs where you don't need to do
anything in order to feel like you have the right
to exist. But then you do lots of stuff anyway,
because that's a fun way to engage with being human
on the earth.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Right now, I'm all for living in the ruins. I
love their life and the ruins. I love their expression,
and I love what you talk about with sort of
just embracing the imperfect life, because I certainly I can
remember my kids are old now, they're teenagers, they're eighteen
and sixteen. When they were little, I just had a
personality where I just mean, I am no longer going
(13:53):
to try to being mother of the year. I just
and I'd like to thank Oliver, I've been a decent
mother that you just just let go of all those
expectations and striving to do everything perfectly to raise these
perfect children and things and just kind of weird. Oh
this is just too much energy, you know.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
And of course, yeah, I mean you'll have you'll have
to tell me if this was your experience. But my
guess is that, in fact, that kind of shift is
associated with becoming better as a parent in the ways
that really matter, because there is a kind of there's
a kind of anxious self focus that goes along with
(14:33):
like constantly checking in to see if you're doing things
at the perfect optimal level that ultimately just doesn't help
us do the things in question, right, I mean, it's
not as important as parenting, but like I find this
a lot in my writing, Like the perfectionist outlook applied
to writing is not a good way to get good
(14:54):
writing done. It's not like, well, it really is agonizing,
but at least you get good results. Now, you don't
get good results that way, You get more sort of
pinched and self conscious and miserable results. Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
It's yeah, I get what you mean about parenting, and
I think you can, you know, apply it to the workplace,
whatever it is that you do. That is something we
were all a little bit guilty of. If I'm going
to be here for and doing this as I've chosen
this as my career. I least I'd be doing it
bloody well. But that might not be the way. That
might not look the way we think it does. It
(15:31):
might be that because I've noticed lately I've started doing
creative and it's and I keep thinking, this is too fun,
this is I'm really enjoying this, but they shouldn't be
paying them for it?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Right?
Speaker 4 (15:41):
This goes so deep, doesn't it, Like if it's not effort,
then is it?
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Is it worth it?
Speaker 4 (15:46):
And that is totally tied up with this kind of
filling the in avoid approach to work and do. One
of the chapters in the in the New Book is
is exploring this idea of how scary it can be
for some of us anyway to actually ask whether some
project that we're embarking on, or some life chapter that
(16:07):
we're embarking on, might end up being easier than we thought,
Like what if this were easy? Is a really powerful
inquiry because actually going into everything, going into the next moment,
in the next moment of life, assuming that you're going
to have some sort of grueling fight, it becomes a
self fulfilling prophecy and makes it much less pleasant.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
I have a tendency to kia a lot about a
vast array of things that I have no control over,
and it can sit quite heavy, and I think probably
a lot of us are feeling this in current times.
What's your what is your advice on staying saying when
the world's bit of a mess?
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I mean, I don't have a magic solution that.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
Makes everything okay at this sort of extraordinarily alarming phase
in world fairs, But I do think it's really tant
to become conscious of the sort of information environment that
we live in and.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
To see that.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
We just through just through digital connectivity, let alone algorithmic
social media.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
You know, we live in this.
Speaker 4 (17:13):
Environment now where anyone who cares at all about the
world at large is going to be asked to care
about everything maximally connected to every story, every alarming new
story of human suffering or political outrageousness or whatever it is,
(17:36):
and that even the most responsible media organizations, the ones
who are never going to sort of lie about what's
happening in the world, are just intrinsically motivated, incentivized they
have to be to sort of push what they're doing
into your consciousness by sort of phrasing it in the
strongest possible terms and you know, getting it in front
(18:00):
of your brain.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
So the result is the sort of arms.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Race of requests to care about things that is then
kind of turned into the kind of actions that are
not actions at all. They feel useful, but they're not useful, right,
Just doom scrolling on some level does feel like you're
doing something, like you're engaging with the world or informing
yourself or something.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
So I think it's really useful to remember that.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
Actually, not only does it a recipe for more sanity
to sort of pick your battles, to decide to kind
of make one or two issues your focus and do
what you can.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
To let go of the rest.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
It's actually better for the world, right, You're going to
have more of an effect on the world by doing that.
In the book, I talk about this story this guy
called Eric Hageman, who was the subject of a New
York Times profile during the first Trump administration because he
decided to sort of block it out from the world
(18:59):
here that none of this was happening. He was politically
opposed to it, so he pretended it wasn't happening. He
didn't watch the news, and it consume the news. When
he went down to his local cafe. He wore noise
canceling headphones with white noise being played through them so
that he didn't have to hear anyone discussing politics, and
of course he was sort of eviscerated in the press
online after this story came out for being terribly selfish,
(19:19):
like how dare he just sort of check out of
this extraordinarily fraught moment. But you read down this story,
it turns out that what he's doing with his time
is when he's not obsessing about politics, is like restoring
an area of wetlands in his local neighborhood that he's
then going to return to public ownership when he's plunged
his life savings into it. And it's like, I read
(19:42):
that story and I thought, actually, I think this guy's
onto something, right.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
It's not clear.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
It's not clear that driving himself crazy with exposure to
all that news would have helped, and it's fairly clear
that the thing he did instead is helping. So I
think it really there's really an argument now in the
environment that we live in, informationally speaking, to know when
to withdraw or attention as well as when to apply it.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
And it's also sort of dealing with what's going on
in our own lives. Everyone's got this shit, as they say,
and you're all dealing with you know, little issues and things.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
I think that was day fourteen when you announce it
we won't even be in a trouble free phase. That
was actually hugely liberating from me. I was like, oh, oh, yeah,
we are actually and we are actually really really good
at solving problems every hour on the hour pretty much embracer.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
Yeah, no, absolutely, and I mean I need reminders of
this stuff all the time. I think that's part of
what motivates the structure of the book. I think like
reminders is where it's at, and the idea that we're
going to sort of plug this in and never need
reminding again is not true.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
I think obviously there are specific problems that you wouldn't
wish on anybody, and you know, plenty of problems I'm
incredibly privileged and lucky not to have in my life.
But the sheer fact of having problems per se cannot be,
when you think about it in detail, a bad thing.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
You're never going to get to a.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Point where there are no problems in your life, and
you wouldn't want to because a problem is just something
that demands your attention, and a world in which nothing
demanded your attention would be kind of.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
Nightmarish in a way.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
A good example in the job context, you know, is,
like I mentioned in that book, a friend of mine
who sort of was really have this sort of epiphany,
getting very annoyed with all the problems she had to
be encountering in her job, and thinking how well she
could do her job if it wasn't for all these problems,
and then suddenly just being struck by the realization that no,
the problems were the job like that was why she
(21:52):
was hired into the position in question, because she could
deal with these problems. If you're in a job that
can be complete routinized into problem free steps, I would
have thought, you know, especially these days, that that job
is maybe not not long for this world. It's the
most sort of easily automate, automatable thing in the world.
(22:14):
So actually sort of humanly confronting problems, especially sort of
interpersonal problems, the things that we get so annoyed with
having to deal with day and day out, it kind
of is life.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Well, you see, that's the thing. My attitude changed. I
felt like I was wearing a bit of a I
don't know, problem solving k class. I love that that
problem sold.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
And then you go and now it's ten, and I'm
done for the day. I've got to ten, I am, and
I've solved enough for today. Do I really need to
do anything else problems today? I mean, there's a lot
of things, Oliver, that pull us in all lots of
different directions. We've got lots of distractions everywhere too. And
you mentioned that the natural state of mind is to
bounce gently around, which creates a lovely image. It's a
(23:00):
very endearing notion. So maybe we shouldn't seccate on controlling
our week, the day, or even the hour in front
of us.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
This question is such a fraught one for me, because, Yeah,
I'm definitely someone who, historically speaking anyway, you know, has
often wanted to try to kind of schedule my day
down to the moment and then within a certain time
period that I've allocated to some piece of work, to
have kind of relentless focus in that time and be
completely undistractable. And in various chapters of this book, I'm
(23:31):
sort of exploring the idea firstly that there are limitations
to how much we could ever expect to achieve this
level of control, but also that it's kind of right,
it's not the most effective way to live. Human attention, naturally,
is not something that has this kind of quality of
(23:53):
being absolutely focused. And then it's only because of pesky
digital devices that anything ever interrupted. Actually it has this
kind of, as you say, some gentle flowing motion from
one thing to another. And then when it comes to
scheduling the day, I mean, it's so easy to create
more disruption to your day by trying to control it
(24:14):
too much. Example, I given the book. You know, if
I'm working at home one afternoon and it's not my
day for school pickup, and I'm working, and my wife
and my son are somewhere else in their house, and
my son sort of bursts in to tell me excitedly
about something he's done at school that day, that's.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
A wonderful thing. And if I'm following some.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Productivity system that has said that four till six is
a deep focused time and therefore this is a terrible interruption,
and I've just turned it into a problem by trying
to exert more control than I really should over my day.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
I have just actively.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
Turned an instance of serendipity into something that's gone wrong
with my day. I think this is an unfortunate way
to live.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
You're listening to the little things, and at least on
the pod cast, today's journalist and author Oliver Berkman talking
about his fabulous book, Meditations for Mortals, we'll be back
after the break.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
We've talked about distractions. But one of the things that
I've noticed myself repeating on the mostly on the most
least decisive of my children, is that the only thing
that they need consider is the consequence of their decision
or of not making a decision. I found this concept
particularly engaging because it's kind of like the reverse of
(25:36):
what I've probably been doing for the first fifty years
of my life.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Can you explain the club?
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Explain their little more for our listeners.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Yeah, So in this chapter, in all these chapters, I'm
sort of starting off with a quote from somebody else
that really sort of shifted my perspective, And in this case,
it's from a therapist called Sheldon cop who very memorably wrote,
You're free to do whatever you like, you need only
face the consequences. The way I think about this is
you know, any decision that we make in life, any
(26:07):
direction we choose to go, has downsides. Right, there's no
situation when you're trying to deal with some sort of
significant moment in your life, a career, choice, relationship issue,
whatever it is, where the choice you make won't have
a downside. The only question you have to deal with
is like, which downside you're willing to shoulder and take
(26:28):
responsibility for which price you're willing to pay. A lot
of us, I think, get mired in kind of paralyzing
indecision for very long period of time because what we've
secretly are looking for is a way to make the
decision without negative consequences. So either we tell ourselves that
we don't have any freedom of choice. We've just got
(26:49):
to do things a certain way and we've just got
to do it and it's not.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Up to us.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
Or we sort of tell ourselves that we ought to
be able to make these choices in a consequence free
way and we resent the idea that there's going to
be downsides to them. But actually it's neither of these, right,
It's just that it's just that you move through life
and you make decisions.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
And there are upsides and downsides to each one.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
So on a I give some examples in the book
of sort of momentous decisions, leaving marriages, things like this,
But just on a very down to earth level, if
you have a certain amount of flexibility of your working day,
you might have the choice of continuing to spend another
hour answering emails between six and seven pm, or going
home and spending more time with your family between six
(27:34):
and seven pm. And it's not that there's a right answer, right.
There could be phases in your career and aspects of
your job where actually it was worth staying and answering
emails and sacrificing that other time with your family. But
it's incredibly useful to see that, like that's the trade off,
and all you're doing is deciding which trade off to make.
You're not there's no point sort of beating yourself up
and not being able to be in two places at once.
(27:57):
There's no secret system that you just haven't discovered yet
for managing to eliminate the disadvantages of a choice you make.
It's just that we just navigate through life choosing which
downsides to.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Accept. And when I can convey this.
Speaker 4 (28:16):
Way, I don't know if I've done it, that's not
for me to say, but like, there's something really freeing
about this. This is like no longer being free from
the constraints of reality, but being free in the constraints
of reality, which I find really really powerful.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Definitely, And I think I wonder though, if it is
a little bit like when you practice mindfulness. And I
remember my teacher saying it's a muscle, just keep practicing it.
And I think that there might be one that the
more you do it and the more you reflect on it,
but not overly, but you know, consider that, consider that
you are just making a choice between one or two
or even three options in front of you, that you
(28:55):
get better at doing it. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
I mean I think so.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
And I think one of the things that happens that's
very useful, especially for sort of inveterate people pleasers, you know,
is you get a lot of feedback, right you take
an action, and in fact, the sky doesn't fall in.
You do something that's going to annoy somebody because you've
got to choose one of two people to annoy in
a certain context, and you.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
Know it's okay, and they're less annoyed than you.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Thought or their annoyance doesn't sort of cause you a
huge disadvantage. So again and again, if you sort of
can act in this way, you get quicker feedback from
the world that it's okay in that sense.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Certainly, I think you get better, and.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
You're also not wasting energy and stressing about trying to
justify your decisions.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
That's right or wasting someone else's.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Time right, absolutely, I mean completely.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
And the sort of the irony of a lot of
this is that the efforts we go to to avoid
making anybody cross with us or to avoid causing anybody
pain often just end up causing more of that annoyance
or pain than being more decisive about it would have done.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
I've definitely said to people, if you can't do this,
just tell me no. And it's more this year than
any other year.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
A lot of something that I really took out of
the book very early on is the idea of just
doing and I this was absolutely fantastic for me. It
was it was it was stop thinking about things, stop
planning to do something, stop researching doing something, just actually
stop and do something. I mean, this is it's such
(30:32):
an easy thing for us to incorporate into our lives
that concept.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Yeah, but I think it's on another level. It's difficult
because what we commonly want to do are the kinds
of things that make us feel more in control of
the situation.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Right.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
We want to educate ourselves or get the system up
and running, or buy the special equipment or whatever. All
these things have in common is that, like they're all
about feeling more and more and more in control, whereas
actually just doing something for ten minutes today, actually just
going for a run, or actually just sitting down and meditating,
(31:09):
or actually having a go at writing the thing you've
been wanting to write, or making the call, whatever it is,
that requires some surrender of control. Right, that's the opposite
of trying to get into a place of control. It's
actually sort of a leap of faith. So yeah, I
sometimes have done, you know, interviews or events where people
say like, Okay, what's one thing that we could do
(31:32):
today to really sort of live in this way? And
the secret agenda is really, what's one technique we could
practice every day, or what's one thing we could incorporate
into our morning routine or something like that. And I
try to sort of forestall that and say, like the
one thing you could do today is just like ten
(31:53):
minutes of the one thing that you know would make
your life a bit more vibrant, you know, creative practice,
nurturing a relationship, being out in nature, whatever it is,
and to find a way to do it, however badly,
and with however little confidence that you're going to do
it every day for the rest of your life or
(32:13):
anything like that, to find a way to do it today.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
So, you know, pick a cliched case. If it is
just like.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Wanting to be in nature, it's like finding ten minutes
to go to the tiny park at the end of
the street today, much more than it is like getting
ready for the big trip into the wilderness in six
months time. I mean, I tend to feel that where
(32:40):
you are there's sort of astonishing wilderness just just down
the street.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
So maybe the analogy doesn't work. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Oh, we get out to the wilderness most Saturday mornings,
don't We can do. And that's another that's a perfect example.
I mean, we have to go early for other responsibility
in your days, but we just get up and we
do it and coming up whilst we do it, and
we're chatting and we're in nature and it's all good
and I'm always going on how it could be anywhere
(33:07):
in the world. So yeah, that doesn't need to be
the big trip in the wilderness. Six months and a
year down the line.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Love the chapter twe on minding your own business. That's
one I also felt like was a really easy one.
But maybe we're not quite so good at doing this,
you know, Will you advise us to allow other people
the problems?
Speaker 3 (33:26):
I think it's incredibly easy.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
We're talking just before about, you know, bearing the consequences
of choices, and I think there's a very common behavior
I've certainly suffered plenty from it that says, well, okay,
that might be okay so far as it goes. But
the one thing that I can't ever do is risk
making people cross with me, or risk disappointing people, and
(33:49):
this leads to all sorts of you know, it's a
very stressful way to live.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
It also doesn't even please people.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
Pleasing doesn't actually please people because they get annoyed with
you're not giving them straight answers to questions or saying
so know when they can't do something, as you just reference,
And I think it can be incredibly useful to understand
that you know other people's emotional responses to the things
(34:17):
you do or don't do are ultimately their business and
their problem. This doesn't need to mean that you don't
care about how people close to you are feeling, or
that you don't you can just sort of go through
life being a huge jerk and making people feel terrible
and saying that's not my problem. But it does mean that,
(34:40):
like the risk of displeasing somebody is not some kind
of like joker card that instantly means you can never,
never do that. It's got to displace all other considerations.
It's just one more thing to be weighed in the balance.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
And you know, to.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
Pick a another cliched example, like if there's an email
from the boss in your inbox and you're wondering whether
to reply to it now or to go and do
something more fun and reply to it later, Like there
are contexts where not making your boss impatient with you
could be the right strategy for you, and there are
context where it might be the sacrifice you were willing
to make, and it will depend on everyone's individual position.
(35:22):
But that kind of weighing things in the balance about
disappointing people, letting people down, not meeting expectations of parents
or internalized parents or whatever. Very different to look at
it as something to be weighed in the balance than
it is to just think of like I've got to
go through life making sure that nobody has ever cross
(35:42):
with me about anything, which is completely impossible. It's trying
to do somebody else's job, really, the regulation of their emotions.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
That's right. And I think I don't know whether or
not we're more guilty of it as we age, but
I think, certainly from a middle aged woman's point of view,
that can be something we get tripped up on. Another
thing that we women. And actually everybody I've talked about
this with the mean of my life too, they met
that they sometimes have imposter syndrome. I mean, why is
(36:13):
it that imposter syndrome is a real waste of out time,
isn't it?
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Yeah, although in a way that might not be immediately evident.
I mean, this is part of the idea that I
keep coming back to in this book, is that there's
a lot of liberation in seeing the ways in which
the human condition is worse than you thought. If you
think that getting on top of your to do list
is really difficult.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
You're going to spend all your life struggling to do it.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
But if you see that it's actually impossible because the
inputs into it are sort of basically infinite, then suddenly
that's not so awful because it's not even on the table.
An imposter syndrome works a little bit like this too.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
I think.
Speaker 4 (36:52):
Implicit in imposter syndrome is the idea that, like, if
you get a lot more experience thunder your belt, or
if you changed your personality in some way, or if
you learned all the right skills, you two could finally
reach this place of being as confident in what you're
doing as all the people surrounding you. But there's great
(37:13):
liberations saying that it's actually worse than that, right, that
you're never going to feel ready to laun to do
sort of new life chapters or new projects in life,
because by definition they're new, right, and you can't be
ready for them. All the people you think are confident
are just a little bit better at hiding it, or
a little bit better more reconciled to the fact that,
like everybody is winging it all the time. So the
(37:37):
answer to imposter syndrome, if you do it if you follow.
The general outlook of this book is not that you
should sort of tell yourself that actually you know exactly
what you're doing, but that you should see that kind
of nobody knows what they're doing, and that that is
a very very good reason not to wait until you
(38:00):
feel like you know what you're doing to make sort
of bold, ambitious moves in your life, but to make
them now, because why wouldn't you.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Francis has been in the media for your whole career.
I've been doing this for a couple of years. I
wouldn't ever have started. I mean, she does know what
she's doing, so that is good. But it's been really
fun for me and it's soon me something though that
I at the beginning was like, oh, I shouldn't be
doing this, you know, And it's crazy because I felt
(38:31):
like I had something tough and me personally, I was
just experimenting with all of the great advice.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
We're getting to prove my life you belong to wse Oliver. Finally,
how might we choose to live in the easy world?
Speaker 3 (38:47):
I think that.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
For a lot of people, including me, there is this
kind of conditioned assumption from childhood, from the culture wherever
that if something is meaningful and work doing, then it's
going to be grueling and take a lot of effort.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
And sort of be a big challenge.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
And if it isn't, when maybe you didn't do it
properly or you made the wrong choice about what to do.
There's an even worse flip side to this, which is
like the idea that if something was effortful, then it
must have been meaningful.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Right if you spend the whole.
Speaker 4 (39:20):
Day like exhausting yourself and busy work, then that must
have been a good thing to do. So it's actually
quite a challenge for such people to consider the possibility
that something they're preparing to do might actually be easier
than they are, assuming that it might be possible to
approach a lot of life in a greater spirit of
(39:41):
ease than you might think. And that idea of easy
world comes from an old book by a writer called
Julia Rodgers Hamrick called Choosing Easy World, which is, you know,
at first I didn't think was going to be my
kind of book. Is a little bit sort of new agey,
I suppose, but she argues that she makes the case
for sort of telling sort of moving into each new
(40:03):
challenge in life by saying to yourself, I choose to
live an easy world where everything is easy. And I
sort of chuckled in a hopefully not too hostile away
when I first came across this thought, but then I
kept encountering it in other places as well, and I
went back to that original book, and there's actually something
(40:25):
really powerful about this idea of just sort of deciding
to move into experiences and move into the next moment
in the expectation of ease. And it even turns out
that difficult experiences because I'm not claiming that there are
no difficult experiences, but like even those go a bit
(40:47):
better when you're moving into them with this sense of ease.
I think there is something in our sort of desire
to control experience that really really ends up kind of
moving into each new moment race for a fight. And
the analogy I give in the book is like, you know,
if you go up to somebody at a bar looking
(41:08):
for a fight, like you get a fight, right, even
if they had no intention of that in the first place.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
And if you move into.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
Reality being like, Okay, I'm going to have to really
pummel the day to get my to get my things done.
There seems to be a sense in which like that's
what you'll get, and it's very educational to sort of
move through the day doing things that feel easy, or
going through with the minispirit of ease. People get worried
(41:34):
that they're going to sail to do all the things
that really matter if they just take this attitude, But
it's not what happens. Like, you don't secretly want to
just do nothing. You secretly want to do the important things.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
And I don't. I don't think it means that you'll
be horribly surprised if something's harder than easy. Do you
know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (41:53):
It's no, it's much right, it's much more sort of
a bodily kind of Yeah. It's braced is the word
I keep coming up again. It's like it's just not
moving through life braced against life.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
It doesn't mean that there isn't going to be pain
and suffering in it. It just means.
Speaker 4 (42:10):
That you're not going to be sort of working on
the assumption that anything worth doing is deeply unpleasant.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
I also too, I have I don't know about you, Francis,
but really really enjoyed all the quotes at the beginning
of the chapters. They set them up beautifully and also
just shows the amount of research that you did too
to help us with these daily intentions.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
Yes, no, those quotes were I mean, I just collect
these things, like I don't know what the right similar
is there, but anyway, I collect a lot of them
and come back and back to them because they really
are great for sort of shifting refreshing my perspective.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Oliver, thank you so much. Thank you for the book.
Thank you for your time, because I know that you're
in very high demand all around the world. We really
really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us
here at the Little Things.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
It's been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Where would you like to start, Louise, Well, I think
I said to you when I gave my dad this
book that he said to me. He read it and said,
I feel like I've been telling you this your whole life.
He has a saying, don't have too many expectations and
you'll never be disappointed. And I used to take the
negative side of that, or.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
My mother was ninety five percent of life is all anticipation.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Oh god, a completely opposite. That's gorgeous. So what I
really like and I to really want people to take
away is that is that very same thing that he
said we've talked about at the artset of the interview,
was that this is not telling you not to have expectations.
This is not telling you to live a quiet life,
will not have any ambition. It's trying to sort of
(43:59):
harness that we are finite and we best will use
our time wisely, happily, joyfully.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
And that life is messy and we're all going to
have problems, and the world's going to have problems, and
there needs to be a level of acceptance in that
and finding that boundary as to what you take on
and what you don't do. You know what, I was
too embarrassed to tell him, what's that When we were
talking about how I just loved this whole idea of doing,
not thinking about or preparing and things like that. The
revelation I actually had was I thought I was doing
(44:28):
when I was doing the prep and thinking about it
and reading the book and mapping out the run and
things like that, as opposed I thought I was doing,
I'm not. I'm just procrastinating. So it was like, you know,
that's lovely frinches get you spend all this time finding
all these lovely walks and runs to do around a
Actually just pack up your shoes, get in the cat,
drive to a bit of abortion, and go for running,
(44:49):
you know what I mean. So that was the funniest
thing for me. It was like, oh, you know, I
just I thought I was doing. That was the revelation.
Well it's different.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
That's a good point. I think we're all guilty sometimes
of sitting s the goal and then and then somehow
magically thinking we're going to reach that goal. And that's
what I mean about the not doing the PhD or
the iron man. It's like, oh, I even set that goal,
I'm not prepared to do what I'd have to do
just to get to that goal. I'm prepared to do
a lot of other things, but I'm not prepared to
(45:19):
do the things that would get me that goal. So
just be real about it. Doesn't mean I'm a loser.
I do lots of other great things.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
You're not a looper. You're not a loser, Louise. I
love the way you go from one extreme to the other.
I'm either going to be that, so I'm going to
be a loser. No, that's not how it works.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
No, No, oli Us taught me that it's all good.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah, and the great thing about his book is and
this is what I really want to get across people.
It is something And I do this all the time.
You know, I read it because I actually interviewed him
on the Sunday Session a while ago. But now I
just pick up I just pick it up and read
a chapter just randomly one day and go, I shouldn't
have to think about that this week. It's nice.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
And we had a quick chat with him after we
spoke to him, and I would not say you don't
have to go out and buy this book for your
teenage and think it's going to change their life. Maybe
leave it lying around Live by example.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
Yeah, well, you can't tell teenagers anything, right, They have
to stumble across these things on their own.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
I know.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
But every time I read a list and I'm like, oh,
one of my kids would really benefit from that. But
I do think living by example is the best thing
you can do. I think you're absolutely right most of
the time. Louise, thank you for joining us on our
New Zealand Herald podcast series Little Things We Hope You
Share this podcast with the women in your life so
we can all just chill the fuck out. You can
(46:29):
follow this podcast on iHeartRadio or where either you get
the podcasts. And for more on this and other topics,
head to insiet Harold dot co dot
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Inset, and we'll get you next time on the Little
Things
Hi, I'm Francesca Rudkin and I'm Louise Area and this
is season four of our New Zealand Herald podcast The
Little Things.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
It is good to have you with us. In this podcast,
we talk to experts and find out all the little
things you need to know to improve all areas of
your life. But you know what, You're never going to
sort your life out. How's that to a positive tip
away to start a podcast?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Words, I love it, It's honest.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
It is not my line. It's the second line of
a book written by an author we've waited a long
time to bring you because he is in such high demand.
The first line is this is a book about how
the world opens up once you realize you're never going
to sort your life out. So it's actually we're not
taking a dark turn. It's actually a really positive statement.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
You know that The Little Things is dedicated to bring
you all the best information we have access to to
live a happy and healthy lifespan. But we don't live fever.
We are mortal and we're not going to get to
experience every little thing we may have on our mental list.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I don't know about you, but as I age, I've
found my mortality does creep into my thoughts more often
than it used to, And of course that comes with
those inevitable questions lou about what's the best way to
spend my time? And even when I come up with
the answer, I don't do it. I just stick with
a daily routine.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Well there's nothing wrong with the daily routine, but me too,
And honestly, I'd rather have that epiphany now than in
twenty years. And I'd say I've had that epiphany off
and on over the years. But like yourself, and and
then you do fall into sort of the same patterns.
A common time waster I'm guilty of is just simply
worrying about things, whether it's a kids, extended family, work, pets, health, wealth,
(01:44):
my kiwi sav.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I think that's perfectly normal.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
The pretty, you know, weird things that are going on
in the world right now. But our guess philosophy has
helped me gain some perspective around this and some other
habits I probably didn't even realize. We're like holding me
back from spending our limited time on the things I
really care about. Thank good, Yeah, are you any good? Francisco?
Being present in the moment, I have to work at it.
(02:11):
It doesn't matter. I've done mindfulness and I think there's
a lot to it, and there's elements of that I
really like. And that's the other thing I like from mindfulness.
You take what works for you and you can leave
the reason that's right. But I still have to work
really hard at it. Yeah, me too, remind myself occasionally. Yeah,
there's plenty of things to take us away from being
in the moment. I think everyone would agree. And the
other thing is, even in the face of all the
(02:34):
evidence in the world, I tend to think that I've
got more control over things than I really have. Are
you a control No?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But I know you like control.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
I do.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I mean we all like control. I like control because
I just know that things are done, and then you know,
things that's sort of done and taken care of and
things like that. But I'm getting loosive with the control
as I get older, because I'm a bit like, what
does it matter?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Well, I have a love hate relationship with it. I
agree with you, it does mean things just get done.
But also I get frustrated when I'm the one doing it,
when it's taking time away from me. So I think
that's one of the things that I've taken away from
this book as well. Do you have any existential crisis
about the about Mortelagy?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
I haven't. I never had never thought about it, and
then it was really weird. It's such a cliche. But
I hit fifty and I went, hang on, how much
more time have I got left? What do I want
to do with my life? I actually do have to
real with you. That don't last long because there's something
else to get all, you know. But I have been
surprised at how I went from never really thinking about
(03:41):
it to actually thinking about it a bit. I think
that could be a midlife thing. Well, it must be
my midlife thing for a certain even the food being
a cliche, but it is. It's a midlife crisis. We
know that there's probably hints I've gone and done pottery.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
We're finally doing my pottery courses. Cliche embracing cliche. Yeah,
And look, I think the other thing is too. We
need to be released from worrying or even thinking about
or aspiring all the time to do all every single
thing we always thought we might in a lifetime. I'm
really learning to let go of that stuff. Because that
was really interesting. You said to me the other day
(04:19):
when we're out on a walk or something.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
We're in the bush and he said to Yep, you know,
I'm really letting go of the stack that I might
not even do an iron Man, and I might not
get my pH d. And I'm just sort of walking
on going. I had no idea that these were your
that you had these sort of ambitions on your on
your bucket list. I suppose you had a list of
these things you can achieve. It's like, oh, I don't
think I knew that. I hadn't Tom either.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
It was when I was challenged to think what really matters,
and I went, ah, I probably have. It's more that
I've wasted time thinking should I do some more study,
should I try harder and do an iron Man, blah
blah blah instead of doing instead of doing it. And
I'm like, nah, And this is what one of the
big lessons that I love in this book is it's
(05:05):
time to stop planning to do something, thinking about doing something,
and actually just start it, just do it or not
or not. Because because after you sort of mention those things,
I was, oh, gosh, I don't I haven't really thought
about what it is I'm going to do you know
what I like to do and the rest of my
life and things like that, and then I mean, oh no,
(05:26):
now I'm just going to think about it for ten years.
And so that's one thing I've really taken from this
book is you know what you're quite keen to do.
So and Oliver uses an example and we'll probably talk
about this when we talk to him. He's the example
of a case. So you think you're going to pick
up meditation, so you think about doing that, and then
you get a book on it, and you read the
book on it, and then you kind of go about
doing it and realize two days later it was a
(05:48):
book that's not really me. Maybe I won't do it,
And all that time you spent thinking about it and
building up expectations before.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
You actually finally got around to doing it. Don't put
so much on it. Just try it one day.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Do it.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
You might not do it the next time, but you
might do the next day. Right, see how it goes.
It's not a big deal. But just stop them ruminating
over everything. Yeah, anyway, to bring his words to life,
Oliver Berkman is going to join us today. Oliver is
a British author and journalist. In twenty twenty one, he
published four thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals, and in
twenty twenty four he followed it up with Meditation for Mortals,
(06:21):
four Weeks to Embrace your limitations and make time for
what counts. Despite the title, he is unfazed by how
long it takes you or how you read this book.
It's simply an aid to a saner and freer life,
served in bite sized chapters, and who of us would
not benefit from that? These days, Oliver has a way
of bringing our mortality home to us in a way
(06:42):
that is genuinely liberating and far from depressing. So we're
as you're delighted to have Oliver with us now. Thank
you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Oliver, Thank you for inviting me so Oliver, the finite
nature of life is central, seems to me central to
your work. Many of us are too busy living to
think about it, or maybe we just don't want to
think about it. Why is it so important that we
acknowledge our mortality?
Speaker 4 (07:06):
I think that's a big question. I think that ultimately
it's sort of it's at the core of sort of
almost everything that causes us stress, causes us anxiety causes
us to not be as fully present for a vibrant
life than we as we might be. Is this desire
to not feel too intensely what it is to be
(07:32):
a finite human. It's not so much about thinking every
day about the end and about death. I mean, I
don't really end up writing all that much about death
and dying per se. It's much more for me the
idea of the sort of the discomfort that is involved
in just sort of having only so many hours in
(07:53):
the day, with an infinite number of things that feel
like they ought to be done in the day, having
only so much control over how time unfolds, or understanding
of what's going on in the world, and still having
to function, you know, in this intrinsically limited state. And
I think we do all sorts of things, including all
(08:14):
sorts of things about trying to sort of manage our
time supposedly well, that are actually serving the purpose of
helping us ignore these truths.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
One thing I love about the book is you've designed
the book to be read one chapter a day for
twenty eight days, or you know, however you want to
read the book, you can dip in and out of it,
which I still go back to and do Now, is
this to let each lesson sink in?
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (08:40):
I mean so, firstly, yes, it's certainly not a law
that you have to read a chapter a day for
twenty eight days in a book that is about releasing.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Some of our attempts to control life.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
I feel like it be hypocritical to be trying to control
how everybody read the book.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
You've got the book, it's your book, and you do
what you like.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
But the sort of idea that I was chasing there
is that I've always found with books of wisdom and
self help, advice, whatever the right phrase is thinking one
of two ways.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Either it's kind of a big perspective shift.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
That then fades away, or it's like a list of
tips to follow that kind of you never get around
to really making yourself follow because you don't understand the
emotional logic behind them. So I wanted to sort of
see if I could make a book that got the
best of both worlds here and kind of led people
through a series of very small perspective shifts of the
(09:34):
kind that would just sort of maybe hang around in
the back of their mind during the day that followed.
I didn't want this to be a book where you think, well,
this is kind of good. I'm going to put this
amazing new system into practice in a few months time
when I finally get a free week with nothing to do,
like because that never happens. So it's much more like
something I hope could sort of just slide in under
(09:57):
people's you know, right in the middle of too many I.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Do love that description of self help books because how often,
lou have you done that?
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Have you got one?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
You go, okay, just get me straight. I'm just going
to skip these chapters, just get me straight to the
list of what I need to do. But you've got
no background or context for it, and you go, just
get to tell me what I need to do, and
then all the end, as you say, quite often you
read a book and you might only come away with
one sort of you know, light bold moment.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
And whereas for me, each day I go, oh, that's
the one. That's the key one for me, and then
the next day, oh, that's the key one. But I
actually I haven't had a book for a long time
that's been quite so it's getting a bit ratty because
I'm just going in quite frequently back to things again
to either refresh my mind obviously I was doing some
(10:43):
research for this, but or to think that this is
something that's come up even in the family of something,
and I pull on that piece of wisdom for some
timely advice. But let's just clear this up at the outset.
You're not telling us through this to give up and
become unambitious and resign to a quiet, unfew full life.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Are you no quite the opposite?
Speaker 4 (11:03):
And I know you're asking that in a spirit of
devil's advocacy, but this has once or twice been leveled
at me, and I get quite defensive in response to it,
because I think in many ways, what I'm trying to
suggest is that it is only when we really sort
of get a bit better at embracing limitation and acknowledging
(11:24):
the way that the ways in which we're limited, that
you are then freed up to really like take the
ambitious actions, do the things that count. It's like it's
when you realize that the moment in the future when
you finally feel in control of everything, on top of everything,
it's when you finally realize that's never coming that you think, well, okay,
(11:45):
I might as well take action on these things.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Right now. I think part of what I'm.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Doing here just as a sort of personal project, is
trying to is trying to explore the possibility it might
be possible to live a sort of less anxious, more
peaceful life and also a very sort of active and
ambitious one. I think mainly just because like I want
both those things in my life.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
So yeah, I remember when I practiced, when I first
out of practice mindfulness, mindfulness, and I came home I
discussed it with the family and said, you know, just
it's not about striving, it's not a bit and they
were like, well, how can I how can life be
bitter if you stop striving? You know? So I get
what you mean having leave it at you. But that's
(12:32):
that's like you say, it's actually the complete opposite.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
Well, and I think an important point here that that
the word striving specifically reminds me of as well, is
it's like, why are you taking action? And a lot
of us, and certainly me historically and to some extent
still today, are what the psychologists call insecure overchievers. Right,
we do lots of stuff and it all that's great,
(12:57):
and we sort of put ourselves out there, but on
some level we're doing that because we feel like if
we don't do it, we don't get to count as
adequate human beings. So you're constantly trying to sort of
earn your place on the planet. And the wonderful thing
at least to aspire to, I think is the is
(13:19):
the state of affairs where you don't need to do
anything in order to feel like you have the right
to exist. But then you do lots of stuff anyway,
because that's a fun way to engage with being human
on the earth.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Right now, I'm all for living in the ruins. I
love their life and the ruins. I love their expression,
and I love what you talk about with sort of
just embracing the imperfect life, because I certainly I can
remember my kids are old now, they're teenagers, they're eighteen
and sixteen. When they were little, I just had a
personality where I just mean, I am no longer going
(13:53):
to try to being mother of the year. I just
and I'd like to thank Oliver, I've been a decent
mother that you just just let go of all those
expectations and striving to do everything perfectly to raise these
perfect children and things and just kind of weird. Oh
this is just too much energy, you know.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
And of course, yeah, I mean you'll have you'll have
to tell me if this was your experience. But my
guess is that, in fact, that kind of shift is
associated with becoming better as a parent in the ways
that really matter, because there is a kind of there's
a kind of anxious self focus that goes along with
(14:33):
like constantly checking in to see if you're doing things
at the perfect optimal level that ultimately just doesn't help
us do the things in question, right, I mean, it's
not as important as parenting, but like I find this
a lot in my writing, Like the perfectionist outlook applied
to writing is not a good way to get good
(14:54):
writing done. It's not like, well, it really is agonizing,
but at least you get good results. Now, you don't
get good results that way, You get more sort of
pinched and self conscious and miserable results. Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
It's yeah, I get what you mean about parenting, and
I think you can, you know, apply it to the workplace,
whatever it is that you do. That is something we
were all a little bit guilty of. If I'm going
to be here for and doing this as I've chosen
this as my career. I least I'd be doing it
bloody well. But that might not be the way. That
might not look the way we think it does. It
(15:31):
might be that because I've noticed lately I've started doing
creative and it's and I keep thinking, this is too fun,
this is I'm really enjoying this, but they shouldn't be
paying them for it?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Right?
Speaker 4 (15:41):
This goes so deep, doesn't it, Like if it's not effort,
then is it?
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Is it worth it?
Speaker 4 (15:46):
And that is totally tied up with this kind of
filling the in avoid approach to work and do. One
of the chapters in the in the New Book is
is exploring this idea of how scary it can be
for some of us anyway to actually ask whether some
project that we're embarking on, or some life chapter that
(16:07):
we're embarking on, might end up being easier than we thought,
Like what if this were easy? Is a really powerful
inquiry because actually going into everything, going into the next moment,
in the next moment of life, assuming that you're going
to have some sort of grueling fight, it becomes a
self fulfilling prophecy and makes it much less pleasant.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
I have a tendency to kia a lot about a
vast array of things that I have no control over,
and it can sit quite heavy, and I think probably
a lot of us are feeling this in current times.
What's your what is your advice on staying saying when
the world's bit of a mess?
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I mean, I don't have a magic solution that.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
Makes everything okay at this sort of extraordinarily alarming phase
in world fairs, But I do think it's really tant
to become conscious of the sort of information environment that
we live in and.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
To see that.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
We just through just through digital connectivity, let alone algorithmic
social media.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
You know, we live in this.
Speaker 4 (17:13):
Environment now where anyone who cares at all about the
world at large is going to be asked to care
about everything maximally connected to every story, every alarming new
story of human suffering or political outrageousness or whatever it is,
(17:36):
and that even the most responsible media organizations, the ones
who are never going to sort of lie about what's
happening in the world, are just intrinsically motivated, incentivized they
have to be to sort of push what they're doing
into your consciousness by sort of phrasing it in the
strongest possible terms and you know, getting it in front
(18:00):
of your brain.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
So the result is the sort of arms.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Race of requests to care about things that is then
kind of turned into the kind of actions that are
not actions at all. They feel useful, but they're not useful, right,
Just doom scrolling on some level does feel like you're
doing something, like you're engaging with the world or informing
yourself or something.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
So I think it's really useful to remember that.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
Actually, not only does it a recipe for more sanity
to sort of pick your battles, to decide to kind
of make one or two issues your focus and do
what you can.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
To let go of the rest.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
It's actually better for the world, right, You're going to
have more of an effect on the world by doing that.
In the book, I talk about this story this guy
called Eric Hageman, who was the subject of a New
York Times profile during the first Trump administration because he
decided to sort of block it out from the world
(18:59):
here that none of this was happening. He was politically
opposed to it, so he pretended it wasn't happening. He
didn't watch the news, and it consume the news. When
he went down to his local cafe. He wore noise
canceling headphones with white noise being played through them so
that he didn't have to hear anyone discussing politics, and
of course he was sort of eviscerated in the press
online after this story came out for being terribly selfish,
(19:19):
like how dare he just sort of check out of
this extraordinarily fraught moment. But you read down this story,
it turns out that what he's doing with his time
is when he's not obsessing about politics, is like restoring
an area of wetlands in his local neighborhood that he's
then going to return to public ownership when he's plunged
his life savings into it. And it's like, I read
(19:42):
that story and I thought, actually, I think this guy's
onto something, right.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
It's not clear.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
It's not clear that driving himself crazy with exposure to
all that news would have helped, and it's fairly clear
that the thing he did instead is helping. So I
think it really there's really an argument now in the
environment that we live in, informationally speaking, to know when
to withdraw or attention as well as when to apply it.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
And it's also sort of dealing with what's going on
in our own lives. Everyone's got this shit, as they say,
and you're all dealing with you know, little issues and things.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
I think that was day fourteen when you announce it
we won't even be in a trouble free phase. That
was actually hugely liberating from me. I was like, oh, oh, yeah,
we are actually and we are actually really really good
at solving problems every hour on the hour pretty much embracer.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
Yeah, no, absolutely, and I mean I need reminders of
this stuff all the time. I think that's part of
what motivates the structure of the book. I think like
reminders is where it's at, and the idea that we're
going to sort of plug this in and never need
reminding again is not true.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
I think obviously there are specific problems that you wouldn't
wish on anybody, and you know, plenty of problems I'm
incredibly privileged and lucky not to have in my life.
But the sheer fact of having problems per se cannot be,
when you think about it in detail, a bad thing.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
You're never going to get to a.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Point where there are no problems in your life, and
you wouldn't want to because a problem is just something
that demands your attention, and a world in which nothing
demanded your attention would be kind of.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
Nightmarish in a way.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
A good example in the job context, you know, is,
like I mentioned in that book, a friend of mine
who sort of was really have this sort of epiphany,
getting very annoyed with all the problems she had to
be encountering in her job, and thinking how well she
could do her job if it wasn't for all these problems,
and then suddenly just being struck by the realization that no,
the problems were the job like that was why she
(21:52):
was hired into the position in question, because she could
deal with these problems. If you're in a job that
can be complete routinized into problem free steps, I would
have thought, you know, especially these days, that that job
is maybe not not long for this world. It's the
most sort of easily automate, automatable thing in the world.
(22:14):
So actually sort of humanly confronting problems, especially sort of
interpersonal problems, the things that we get so annoyed with
having to deal with day and day out, it kind
of is life.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Well, you see, that's the thing. My attitude changed. I
felt like I was wearing a bit of a I
don't know, problem solving k class. I love that that
problem sold.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
And then you go and now it's ten, and I'm
done for the day. I've got to ten, I am, and
I've solved enough for today. Do I really need to
do anything else problems today? I mean, there's a lot
of things, Oliver, that pull us in all lots of
different directions. We've got lots of distractions everywhere too. And
you mentioned that the natural state of mind is to
bounce gently around, which creates a lovely image. It's a
(23:00):
very endearing notion. So maybe we shouldn't seccate on controlling
our week, the day, or even the hour in front
of us.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
This question is such a fraught one for me, because, Yeah,
I'm definitely someone who, historically speaking anyway, you know, has
often wanted to try to kind of schedule my day
down to the moment and then within a certain time
period that I've allocated to some piece of work, to
have kind of relentless focus in that time and be
completely undistractable. And in various chapters of this book, I'm
(23:31):
sort of exploring the idea firstly that there are limitations
to how much we could ever expect to achieve this
level of control, but also that it's kind of right,
it's not the most effective way to live. Human attention, naturally,
is not something that has this kind of quality of
(23:53):
being absolutely focused. And then it's only because of pesky
digital devices that anything ever interrupted. Actually it has this
kind of, as you say, some gentle flowing motion from
one thing to another. And then when it comes to
scheduling the day, I mean, it's so easy to create
more disruption to your day by trying to control it
(24:14):
too much. Example, I given the book. You know, if
I'm working at home one afternoon and it's not my
day for school pickup, and I'm working, and my wife
and my son are somewhere else in their house, and
my son sort of bursts in to tell me excitedly
about something he's done at school that day, that's.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
A wonderful thing. And if I'm following some.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Productivity system that has said that four till six is
a deep focused time and therefore this is a terrible interruption,
and I've just turned it into a problem by trying
to exert more control than I really should over my day.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
I have just actively.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
Turned an instance of serendipity into something that's gone wrong
with my day. I think this is an unfortunate way
to live.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
You're listening to the little things, and at least on
the pod cast, today's journalist and author Oliver Berkman talking
about his fabulous book, Meditations for Mortals, we'll be back
after the break.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
We've talked about distractions. But one of the things that
I've noticed myself repeating on the mostly on the most
least decisive of my children, is that the only thing
that they need consider is the consequence of their decision
or of not making a decision. I found this concept
particularly engaging because it's kind of like the reverse of
(25:36):
what I've probably been doing for the first fifty years
of my life.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Can you explain the club?
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Explain their little more for our listeners.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Yeah, So in this chapter, in all these chapters, I'm
sort of starting off with a quote from somebody else
that really sort of shifted my perspective, And in this case,
it's from a therapist called Sheldon cop who very memorably wrote,
You're free to do whatever you like, you need only
face the consequences. The way I think about this is
you know, any decision that we make in life, any
(26:07):
direction we choose to go, has downsides. Right, there's no
situation when you're trying to deal with some sort of
significant moment in your life, a career, choice, relationship issue,
whatever it is, where the choice you make won't have
a downside. The only question you have to deal with
is like, which downside you're willing to shoulder and take
(26:28):
responsibility for which price you're willing to pay. A lot
of us, I think, get mired in kind of paralyzing
indecision for very long period of time because what we've
secretly are looking for is a way to make the
decision without negative consequences. So either we tell ourselves that
we don't have any freedom of choice. We've just got
(26:49):
to do things a certain way and we've just got
to do it and it's not.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Up to us.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
Or we sort of tell ourselves that we ought to
be able to make these choices in a consequence free
way and we resent the idea that there's going to
be downsides to them. But actually it's neither of these, right,
It's just that it's just that you move through life
and you make decisions.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
And there are upsides and downsides to each one.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
So on a I give some examples in the book
of sort of momentous decisions, leaving marriages, things like this,
But just on a very down to earth level, if
you have a certain amount of flexibility of your working day,
you might have the choice of continuing to spend another
hour answering emails between six and seven pm, or going
home and spending more time with your family between six
(27:34):
and seven pm. And it's not that there's a right answer, right.
There could be phases in your career and aspects of
your job where actually it was worth staying and answering
emails and sacrificing that other time with your family. But
it's incredibly useful to see that, like that's the trade off,
and all you're doing is deciding which trade off to make.
You're not there's no point sort of beating yourself up
and not being able to be in two places at once.
(27:57):
There's no secret system that you just haven't discovered yet
for managing to eliminate the disadvantages of a choice you make.
It's just that we just navigate through life choosing which
downsides to.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Accept. And when I can convey this.
Speaker 4 (28:16):
Way, I don't know if I've done it, that's not
for me to say, but like, there's something really freeing
about this. This is like no longer being free from
the constraints of reality, but being free in the constraints
of reality, which I find really really powerful.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Definitely, And I think I wonder though, if it is
a little bit like when you practice mindfulness. And I
remember my teacher saying it's a muscle, just keep practicing it.
And I think that there might be one that the
more you do it and the more you reflect on it,
but not overly, but you know, consider that, consider that
you are just making a choice between one or two
or even three options in front of you, that you
(28:55):
get better at doing it. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
I mean I think so.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
And I think one of the things that happens that's
very useful, especially for sort of inveterate people pleasers, you know,
is you get a lot of feedback, right you take
an action, and in fact, the sky doesn't fall in.
You do something that's going to annoy somebody because you've
got to choose one of two people to annoy in
a certain context, and you.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
Know it's okay, and they're less annoyed than you.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Thought or their annoyance doesn't sort of cause you a
huge disadvantage. So again and again, if you sort of
can act in this way, you get quicker feedback from
the world that it's okay in that sense.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Certainly, I think you get better, and.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
You're also not wasting energy and stressing about trying to
justify your decisions.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
That's right or wasting someone else's.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Time right, absolutely, I mean completely.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
And the sort of the irony of a lot of
this is that the efforts we go to to avoid
making anybody cross with us or to avoid causing anybody
pain often just end up causing more of that annoyance
or pain than being more decisive about it would have done.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
I've definitely said to people, if you can't do this,
just tell me no. And it's more this year than
any other year.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
A lot of something that I really took out of
the book very early on is the idea of just
doing and I this was absolutely fantastic for me. It
was it was it was stop thinking about things, stop
planning to do something, stop researching doing something, just actually
stop and do something. I mean, this is it's such
(30:32):
an easy thing for us to incorporate into our lives
that concept.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Yeah, but I think it's on another level. It's difficult
because what we commonly want to do are the kinds
of things that make us feel more in control of
the situation.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Right.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
We want to educate ourselves or get the system up
and running, or buy the special equipment or whatever. All
these things have in common is that, like they're all
about feeling more and more and more in control, whereas
actually just doing something for ten minutes today, actually just
going for a run, or actually just sitting down and meditating,
(31:09):
or actually having a go at writing the thing you've
been wanting to write, or making the call, whatever it is,
that requires some surrender of control. Right, that's the opposite
of trying to get into a place of control. It's
actually sort of a leap of faith. So yeah, I
sometimes have done, you know, interviews or events where people
say like, Okay, what's one thing that we could do
(31:32):
today to really sort of live in this way? And
the secret agenda is really, what's one technique we could
practice every day, or what's one thing we could incorporate
into our morning routine or something like that. And I
try to sort of forestall that and say, like the
one thing you could do today is just like ten
(31:53):
minutes of the one thing that you know would make
your life a bit more vibrant, you know, creative practice,
nurturing a relationship, being out in nature, whatever it is,
and to find a way to do it, however badly,
and with however little confidence that you're going to do
it every day for the rest of your life or
(32:13):
anything like that, to find a way to do it today.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
So, you know, pick a cliched case. If it is
just like.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Wanting to be in nature, it's like finding ten minutes
to go to the tiny park at the end of
the street today, much more than it is like getting
ready for the big trip into the wilderness in six
months time. I mean, I tend to feel that where
(32:40):
you are there's sort of astonishing wilderness just just down
the street.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
So maybe the analogy doesn't work. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Oh, we get out to the wilderness most Saturday mornings,
don't We can do. And that's another that's a perfect example.
I mean, we have to go early for other responsibility
in your days, but we just get up and we
do it and coming up whilst we do it, and
we're chatting and we're in nature and it's all good
and I'm always going on how it could be anywhere
(33:07):
in the world. So yeah, that doesn't need to be
the big trip in the wilderness. Six months and a
year down the line.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Love the chapter twe on minding your own business. That's
one I also felt like was a really easy one.
But maybe we're not quite so good at doing this,
you know, Will you advise us to allow other people
the problems?
Speaker 3 (33:26):
I think it's incredibly easy.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
We're talking just before about, you know, bearing the consequences
of choices, and I think there's a very common behavior
I've certainly suffered plenty from it that says, well, okay,
that might be okay so far as it goes. But
the one thing that I can't ever do is risk
making people cross with me, or risk disappointing people, and
(33:49):
this leads to all sorts of you know, it's a
very stressful way to live.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
It also doesn't even please people.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
Pleasing doesn't actually please people because they get annoyed with
you're not giving them straight answers to questions or saying
so know when they can't do something, as you just reference,
And I think it can be incredibly useful to understand
that you know other people's emotional responses to the things
(34:17):
you do or don't do are ultimately their business and
their problem. This doesn't need to mean that you don't
care about how people close to you are feeling, or
that you don't you can just sort of go through
life being a huge jerk and making people feel terrible
and saying that's not my problem. But it does mean that,
(34:40):
like the risk of displeasing somebody is not some kind
of like joker card that instantly means you can never,
never do that. It's got to displace all other considerations.
It's just one more thing to be weighed in the balance.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
And you know, to.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
Pick a another cliched example, like if there's an email
from the boss in your inbox and you're wondering whether
to reply to it now or to go and do
something more fun and reply to it later, Like there
are contexts where not making your boss impatient with you
could be the right strategy for you, and there are
context where it might be the sacrifice you were willing
to make, and it will depend on everyone's individual position.
(35:22):
But that kind of weighing things in the balance about
disappointing people, letting people down, not meeting expectations of parents
or internalized parents or whatever. Very different to look at
it as something to be weighed in the balance than
it is to just think of like I've got to
go through life making sure that nobody has ever cross
(35:42):
with me about anything, which is completely impossible. It's trying
to do somebody else's job, really, the regulation of their emotions.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
That's right. And I think I don't know whether or
not we're more guilty of it as we age, but
I think, certainly from a middle aged woman's point of view,
that can be something we get tripped up on. Another
thing that we women. And actually everybody I've talked about
this with the mean of my life too, they met
that they sometimes have imposter syndrome. I mean, why is
(36:13):
it that imposter syndrome is a real waste of out time,
isn't it?
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Yeah, although in a way that might not be immediately evident.
I mean, this is part of the idea that I
keep coming back to in this book, is that there's
a lot of liberation in seeing the ways in which
the human condition is worse than you thought. If you
think that getting on top of your to do list
is really difficult.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
You're going to spend all your life struggling to do it.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
But if you see that it's actually impossible because the
inputs into it are sort of basically infinite, then suddenly
that's not so awful because it's not even on the table.
An imposter syndrome works a little bit like this too.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
I think.
Speaker 4 (36:52):
Implicit in imposter syndrome is the idea that, like, if
you get a lot more experience thunder your belt, or
if you changed your personality in some way, or if
you learned all the right skills, you two could finally
reach this place of being as confident in what you're
doing as all the people surrounding you. But there's great
(37:13):
liberations saying that it's actually worse than that, right, that
you're never going to feel ready to laun to do
sort of new life chapters or new projects in life,
because by definition they're new, right, and you can't be
ready for them. All the people you think are confident
are just a little bit better at hiding it, or
a little bit better more reconciled to the fact that,
like everybody is winging it all the time. So the
(37:37):
answer to imposter syndrome, if you do it if you follow.
The general outlook of this book is not that you
should sort of tell yourself that actually you know exactly
what you're doing, but that you should see that kind
of nobody knows what they're doing, and that that is
a very very good reason not to wait until you
(38:00):
feel like you know what you're doing to make sort
of bold, ambitious moves in your life, but to make
them now, because why wouldn't you.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Francis has been in the media for your whole career.
I've been doing this for a couple of years. I
wouldn't ever have started. I mean, she does know what
she's doing, so that is good. But it's been really
fun for me and it's soon me something though that
I at the beginning was like, oh, I shouldn't be
doing this, you know, And it's crazy because I felt
(38:31):
like I had something tough and me personally, I was
just experimenting with all of the great advice.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
We're getting to prove my life you belong to wse Oliver. Finally,
how might we choose to live in the easy world?
Speaker 3 (38:47):
I think that.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
For a lot of people, including me, there is this
kind of conditioned assumption from childhood, from the culture wherever
that if something is meaningful and work doing, then it's
going to be grueling and take a lot of effort.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
And sort of be a big challenge.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
And if it isn't, when maybe you didn't do it
properly or you made the wrong choice about what to do.
There's an even worse flip side to this, which is
like the idea that if something was effortful, then it
must have been meaningful.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Right if you spend the whole.
Speaker 4 (39:20):
Day like exhausting yourself and busy work, then that must
have been a good thing to do. So it's actually
quite a challenge for such people to consider the possibility
that something they're preparing to do might actually be easier
than they are, assuming that it might be possible to
approach a lot of life in a greater spirit of
(39:41):
ease than you might think. And that idea of easy
world comes from an old book by a writer called
Julia Rodgers Hamrick called Choosing Easy World, which is, you know,
at first I didn't think was going to be my
kind of book. Is a little bit sort of new agey,
I suppose, but she argues that she makes the case
for sort of telling sort of moving into each new
(40:03):
challenge in life by saying to yourself, I choose to
live an easy world where everything is easy. And I
sort of chuckled in a hopefully not too hostile away
when I first came across this thought, but then I
kept encountering it in other places as well, and I
went back to that original book, and there's actually something
(40:25):
really powerful about this idea of just sort of deciding
to move into experiences and move into the next moment
in the expectation of ease. And it even turns out
that difficult experiences because I'm not claiming that there are
no difficult experiences, but like even those go a bit
(40:47):
better when you're moving into them with this sense of ease.
I think there is something in our sort of desire
to control experience that really really ends up kind of
moving into each new moment race for a fight. And
the analogy I give in the book is like, you know,
if you go up to somebody at a bar looking
(41:08):
for a fight, like you get a fight, right, even
if they had no intention of that in the first place.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
And if you move into.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
Reality being like, Okay, I'm going to have to really
pummel the day to get my to get my things done.
There seems to be a sense in which like that's
what you'll get, and it's very educational to sort of
move through the day doing things that feel easy, or
going through with the minispirit of ease. People get worried
(41:34):
that they're going to sail to do all the things
that really matter if they just take this attitude, But
it's not what happens. Like, you don't secretly want to
just do nothing. You secretly want to do the important things.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
And I don't. I don't think it means that you'll
be horribly surprised if something's harder than easy. Do you
know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (41:53):
It's no, it's much right, it's much more sort of
a bodily kind of Yeah. It's braced is the word
I keep coming up again. It's like it's just not
moving through life braced against life.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
It doesn't mean that there isn't going to be pain
and suffering in it. It just means.
Speaker 4 (42:10):
That you're not going to be sort of working on
the assumption that anything worth doing is deeply unpleasant.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
I also too, I have I don't know about you, Francis,
but really really enjoyed all the quotes at the beginning
of the chapters. They set them up beautifully and also
just shows the amount of research that you did too
to help us with these daily intentions.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
Yes, no, those quotes were I mean, I just collect
these things, like I don't know what the right similar
is there, but anyway, I collect a lot of them
and come back and back to them because they really
are great for sort of shifting refreshing my perspective.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Oliver, thank you so much. Thank you for the book.
Thank you for your time, because I know that you're
in very high demand all around the world. We really
really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us
here at the Little Things.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
It's been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Where would you like to start, Louise, Well, I think
I said to you when I gave my dad this
book that he said to me. He read it and said,
I feel like I've been telling you this your whole life.
He has a saying, don't have too many expectations and
you'll never be disappointed. And I used to take the
negative side of that, or.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
My mother was ninety five percent of life is all anticipation.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Oh god, a completely opposite. That's gorgeous. So what I
really like and I to really want people to take
away is that is that very same thing that he
said we've talked about at the artset of the interview,
was that this is not telling you not to have expectations.
This is not telling you to live a quiet life,
will not have any ambition. It's trying to sort of
(43:59):
harness that we are finite and we best will use
our time wisely, happily, joyfully.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
And that life is messy and we're all going to
have problems, and the world's going to have problems, and
there needs to be a level of acceptance in that
and finding that boundary as to what you take on
and what you don't do. You know what, I was
too embarrassed to tell him, what's that When we were
talking about how I just loved this whole idea of doing,
not thinking about or preparing and things like that. The
revelation I actually had was I thought I was doing
(44:28):
when I was doing the prep and thinking about it
and reading the book and mapping out the run and
things like that, as opposed I thought I was doing,
I'm not. I'm just procrastinating. So it was like, you know,
that's lovely frinches get you spend all this time finding
all these lovely walks and runs to do around a
Actually just pack up your shoes, get in the cat,
drive to a bit of abortion, and go for running,
(44:49):
you know what I mean. So that was the funniest
thing for me. It was like, oh, you know, I
just I thought I was doing. That was the revelation.
Well it's different.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
That's a good point. I think we're all guilty sometimes
of sitting s the goal and then and then somehow
magically thinking we're going to reach that goal. And that's
what I mean about the not doing the PhD or
the iron man. It's like, oh, I even set that goal,
I'm not prepared to do what I'd have to do
just to get to that goal. I'm prepared to do
a lot of other things, but I'm not prepared to
(45:19):
do the things that would get me that goal. So
just be real about it. Doesn't mean I'm a loser.
I do lots of other great things.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
You're not a looper. You're not a loser, Louise. I
love the way you go from one extreme to the other.
I'm either going to be that, so I'm going to
be a loser. No, that's not how it works.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
No, No, oli Us taught me that it's all good.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah, and the great thing about his book is and
this is what I really want to get across people.
It is something And I do this all the time.
You know, I read it because I actually interviewed him
on the Sunday Session a while ago. But now I
just pick up I just pick it up and read
a chapter just randomly one day and go, I shouldn't
have to think about that this week. It's nice.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
And we had a quick chat with him after we
spoke to him, and I would not say you don't
have to go out and buy this book for your
teenage and think it's going to change their life. Maybe
leave it lying around Live by example.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
Yeah, well, you can't tell teenagers anything, right, They have
to stumble across these things on their own.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
I know.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
But every time I read a list and I'm like, oh,
one of my kids would really benefit from that. But
I do think living by example is the best thing
you can do. I think you're absolutely right most of
the time. Louise, thank you for joining us on our
New Zealand Herald podcast series Little Things We Hope You
Share this podcast with the women in your life so
we can all just chill the fuck out. You can
(46:29):
follow this podcast on iHeartRadio or where either you get
the podcasts. And for more on this and other topics,
head to insiet Harold dot co dot
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Inset, and we'll get you next time on the Little
Things
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