October 8, 2024 • 54 mins
In this episode, Oliver Burkeman, discusses how to accept limitations and make time for what counts. He offers a compelling exploration of the challenges inherent in daily living. With a focus on understanding imperfectionism and life’s constraints, his work provides practical strategies and thought-provoking insights for finding greater balance and meaning in life.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Embrace imperfectionism to unlock personal growth potential
- Discover techniques to infuse everyday life with meaning and purpose
- Overcome the challenge of finite time to live a fulfilling life
- Shift from perfectionism to take meaningful action in life
- Master strategies to manage information overload and find balance
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The reason that we struggle in life more than we
need to, or so I claim in this book and elsewhere,
is that we're trying to sort of transcend our limitations.
We're trying to get out of the condition of being
human instead of entering more fully into and almost kind
of harnessing in a sense, the condition of being fully human.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:47):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
and creative effort to make a life forth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
(01:21):
for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Oliver Berkman,
a British author and journalist, formerly writing the weekly column.
This column will Change your Life for the newspaper The Guardian.
Oliver is also the author of three books, including the
new one discussed here, Meditation for Mortals Four Weeks To
Embrace your limitations and make time for what counts.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Hi, Oliver, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Thanks very much for having me back.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah. I was saying to you before we started that
you were one of the first few interviews we ever did,
which was a decade ago, and I was so excited
when you said yes because the title of your book,
The Antidote Happiness for a Peace People who Hate Positive Thinking,
sounded like the book title I wish I had come
up with. So I was so excited to talk to
you then. And you've been on a couple times since
(02:07):
and I always enjoy speaking with you. We're going to
be discussing your latest book, which is called Meditation for
Mortals Four Weeks to Embrace your limitations and make time
for what counts. But before we get into that, we'll
start like we always do with the parable. In the parable,
there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
(02:27):
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops thinks about
it for a second. They look up at their grandparent
and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,
the one you feed. So I'd love to know how
(02:51):
that parable applies to you and your life and in
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
While I hope in my book and in my work
I have some sort of country intuitive interpretations of things,
I feel like what that says to me, certainly right
now is very feels very plain. It's just it's straightforward
and right and true. Which is that where you focus
your energy and your finite time and your finite attention
and all the rest of it is the life that
(03:16):
you create. I know from listening to the podcasts that
people have a wide variety of interpretations of this story,
But to me, that's just like, what could it mean
by that?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Yeah? On one level, it is very straightforward and very simple.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
And I don't say that as a criticism. Right right
I feel like at the place I'm at, certainly in
my career, certainly and probably life as a whole. It's like,
I don't want to shy away from the straightforward, obvious
thing if that happens to be the truth thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Absolutely. In your latest book, you're delving into something you're
calling imperfectionism. And I can't remember whether that's a term
you used in the previous book or you've started to
use it, but it's a good encapsulation for what this
book is about. What is imperfectionism?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
It really is, you know, an umbrella term for the
things I want to You've got to have a proprietary label, right, Yes, yes, welcome.
Gladwell would have got nowhere if you'd just said, like, well,
there's a threshold sometimes and on one side of the
threshold things behave different No, it's the tipping point. I'm kidding,
but I think it does identify something real. I guess
this book in terms of what it means for me,
(04:17):
it's a book about addressing the challenge because I myself
found myself constantly encountering this challenge of going from knowing
very well how you want to be living a more
meaningful life showing up for a more meaningfully productive, attentive, energized,
enjoyable life and like actually doing it, And in some ways,
(04:39):
even off the back of my last book, Four Thousand
Weeks Right, I felt like I had really understood something
as a result of writing that about what it means
to be finite and what it means to have such
limited time and limited ability to control the time that
we do get, but discovering that that doesn't automatically add
up to like, Okay, now you just live differently from
now on successfully because you've developed this so the book
(05:01):
and we can talk a bit about both the messages
in the book and kind of the structure of the book,
maybe because I think that's an important part of this
whole idea of going from thinking about actually doing them.
But essentially the answer to how do you go from
knowing the right thing to do to actually doing it
is the set of outlooks and techniques that I group
under imperfectionism. It is an approach that prefers taking action
(05:28):
right now, even if it feels like you don't quite
know what you're doing, or you're not sure if you're
going to be able to turn it into a long
term habit, or if you're not sure that the quality
of the work you produce are going to be any
good over these kind of long term schemes of fixing
all your problems, changing all your habits, setting up the
ideal morning routine, and becoming a different kind of person.
And I think that personal development and self help culture
(05:52):
and all the rest of it, while it has a
lot of useful stuff in it, can really end up
making this problem worse. Right, embarking on a path of
always being in the process of getting to the place
where you're going to feel in control at last, You're
going to feel in the driver's seat. You're going to
feel like you know what you're doing, or like you're
on top of all your demands and pleasing everybody, whatever
(06:12):
version of it it is for you. And so what
I wanted to do was really kind of zero in
on this question of like, well, that's not working, so
what does work right?
Speaker 3 (06:20):
And it is true that we face a lot of limitations,
and those limitations are different from person to person, But
I feel like one of the things that this show
has done over the years that gets reported back to me,
maybe more than anything else that's helpful is people realizing
that it's okay that they're struggling, or that things aren't easy,
(06:43):
or that there is difficulty in life, that that's just
to be human. You don't get out of that, right.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
I think you know two opposite things are true here
what you just said life is difficult, and then in
a certain sense, life is easier than we make it.
But they're connected because the reason that we struggle in
life more than we need to, or so I claim
in this book and elsewhere, is that we're trying to
sort of transcend our limitations. We're trying to get out
(07:10):
of the condition of being human instead of entering more
fully into and almost kind of harnessing in a sense,
the condition of being fully human. So, yeah, if you
stake your self worth on being able to answer any
number of emails and you're in a job where you're
getting an impossible number, then you are going to feel
very bad about yourself. If you can learn in certain
(07:30):
ways to understand that that is an impossible situation, that
meeting that sort of infinite demand is not on the
cards for a finite human, then you can actually you're
much more free to now focus on the important emails,
feel better about yourself, make some time for other things
in your life. So that kind of pattern repeats itself
again and again. I feel like in what I'm writing about,
(07:50):
it's the struggle to get out of our our built
in limitations that causes the extra layer of difficulty. And
that's kind of the same point as saying that it's
difficult and there are problems right with being a human.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, Oftentimes I just think of it as like, how
do I not this sounds pessimistic, but how do I
not make things worse? Right, like by thinking that I
should be able to fix this, or I should be
able to do this, and that there's something wrong with
me when I can't right right?
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Yeah, absolutely, And that.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Mobility, like you're saying to just embrace that doesn't make
the difficult stuff go away, but it certainly stops us from,
you know, at least in my case, compounding, right, the difficulty.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
It stops you from compounding the difficulty, and it sort
of allows you to live in a way that honors
all that stuff as a part of your life, and
that makes it meaningful. Now it's easy to say, and
you know, I'm always a wary of somebody listening who's
you know, recently experienced a tragedy far greater than any
I've experienced. Yet, so that was saying, you know, well,
(08:56):
that's easy to say, but I think it is true.
I think life can make it harder to accept or easier,
depending on your situation. But it is true that once
you're no longer treating life as a problem to be solved,
that's when the problems that it will throw you away
all the time unendingly can become sources of meaning instead
(09:19):
of things that you have to somehow get rid of.
And you're a failure because you haven't yet reached the
part of your life that has no problems in it.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
You talk a lot about how if we try and
control the world that a that's not a strategy that
often works, right, because it just slides right out of
our hands. Yeah, but that furthermore, the attempt to control
dens us to our lives. You use a phrase, I
(09:46):
don't know who it is, but the life loses its resonance.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
This is a think a German thinking called hartmut Rosa
who whose work sort of blew my mind when I
encountered it, especially because it's in such a sort of
academic setting. You don't expect to be so incredibly useful
and illuminating in a personal sense. But this is just
from my own experience right as a kind of somewhat insecure,
quite driven, slightly fixated on productivity and efficiency type person,
(10:16):
you're engaged in this effort to make life feel okay
by exerting more control over it, by feeling like you're
on top of things, by feeling like you're keeping track
of everything, or that you've optimized yourself so well that
you can handle everything that's thrown at you. And sure,
a lot of time it just doesn't work. And I
wrote a little bit in my previous book about how
getting really good at answering email just means you get
(10:37):
more email and doesn't actually leave you more in charge
of things at all. But also, yeah, and this is
where hartmut Rose's work was so important. It squeezes the
thing that makes life worth living out of life. It
makes things feel less resonant. His term is resonance, and
he's referring to the way that not that we should
just sort of give up attempting to have any influence
over life. That's taking things too far in the other direction,
(10:59):
but that really organizing both our lives and our societies
on some level as efforts to expand our control over
things predictably has this unintended consequence of making them feel
not enjoyable or meaningful anymore. So quick couple of examples,
(11:21):
I might be helpful, you know. I know that I'm
not alone in among sort of productivity geek people in
having this experience of coming across some exciting new system
for setting goals in life and coming up with like
what you're going to do in the next ninety days
or the next year, and making it all really specific
and breaking it all down into the steps, and feeling
so excited about it on like Monday, drawing up the schedule,
(11:42):
and by Tuesday or Wednesday, this is like the worst
thing in the world, right. It just feels completely oppressive,
this prison that you've built for yourself in an effort
to get control over your life, because now it feels
like you've just got to follow these steps and there's
no sort of real intuitive engagement with the moment anymore.
It's just like carrying out all these these tasks that
(12:04):
this jerk, namely me, two days ago, has instructed me
to carry out, but right to the other end of
the scale, just quickly. I don't know anyone has either
got experience of working in or knows people who work
in education, healthcare, sort of government, social services, things like that.
And this is a heart Moros's point. In all these
sectors of work now, people complain all the time that
(12:25):
they can't do their jobs because there's so much documentation
and paperwork around doing their jobs. They have to spend
so much time accounting for themselves and recording things that
they don't get to do those moments of human connection
where the work really gets done. And he points out
this is companies and governments wanting to make everything controllable
and visible and predictable in a somewhat similar way to
(12:47):
the productivity geek really and as a result, making it
harder for a teacher and a pupil to connect, or
for a social worker and a client to actually have
a moment of you know, getting to the core of
what the problem is or something like that, because of
this fixation on control. So I was really interested in
the way that seems to apply both to my sort
of day to day routines and to whole swathes of
(13:08):
society at the same time.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
So this new book, Meditations for Mortals, is four weeks
of reflections that we can do to help us, I
would say, internalize some of these ideas and as you
said earlier, help us maybe live some of them out.
Why that structure.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
I really wanted if I was going to write a
book that was about this challenge of actually living differently
instead of just thinking about it and planning to do it,
I wanted to make sure that the book, as far
as any book could and there are limitations there, but
embodied that right that it didn't turn into some new
system that you could read and store away in your
(13:48):
head and then put into practice one day when you
get a spare moment, because there aren't any spare moments.
When did you lost get a spare moment? Ridiculous? So
I wanted the book to be something that people could read. Again,
you don't have to follow mine instructions, but the invitation
is that you read one of these short chapters each day,
take a few minutes, and if some of those sort
of shifts and perspective or those suggested tools and techniques
(14:09):
work for you, that's going to change, in a small
way how you live that day. Not some big charactery
invention that you're going to get involved in six months
from now, but just on the day to day texture
of life, and on the level of what I'm explicitly
saying in those chapters as well, I'm sort of constantly
pulling the rug I hope under away from any attempt
(14:30):
to say, Okay, this is great, I'm going to note
it down and have a whole new system of habits.
It's like, no, just do this one thing today, because
it's actually quite hard to do that for a certain
kind of person of whom I am to just try
it once, to just behave a little bit differently in
a positive sense towards one person, without having any confidence
(14:53):
that you're going to make this stick or keep it
up as a regular habit or anything like that. And
so that's what I'm really trying to d home every day,
and then the four weeks sort of build on each other. Right,
So there intended to be a bit of a journey
from starting more philosophically, getting quite concrete, and then ending
a bit more philosophically again.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I guess the thing about habits is that we know
repetition can be a very positive thing, right if we're
pointed in the right direction, A habit can be beneficial
to us because it just sort of allows a good
behavior to happen a little bit easier, and at the
same time they can be deadening, right, just go through
(15:32):
the motions. It's sort of interviewed a guy I don't know,
Michael Norton, who wrote a book about rituals. But the
core idea, which is just that habits almost have the
meaning sucked out of them. You don't think about the
meaning because you just do the thing. And again it's
good and bad. But a ritual is an action that
you take that you're trying to imbue with emotions specifically.
(15:52):
And so I love this idea that you're pointing at,
which is you don't have to do something again and
again and again and every day to have value.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Right. That is absolutely right. And you know, the other
thing I would add is that very often, I think, certainly,
if I examine in my own life the habits that
have stuck, what happened was that they emerged through that
process of just doing it sometimes right. They They were
not always these sort of top down willed efforts at
exerting control over how I lived my life. And so
(16:24):
I'm not even in some level making a point against habits.
I'm just making a point about how habits can emerge.
Everything has to start with a willingness to just right
now do something that feels meaningful for ten minutes. You
know one thing, and I guess part of this point
of this book is is a reaction to seeing in me,
as much as in anybody else, the incredible sort of
(16:44):
seductiveness of not doing that. It makes you feel much
more secure on some level to believe that you're involved
in a process of reaching towards perfection but you're not
there yet, than to say, actually, I'm just going to
live a little bit differently today.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
Which is ultimately all you can do, because you can't
live next Thursday. You can only live today, right, and
you can only take action today. And it's overly obvious.
But when I was coaching people, I would the same
thing would happen. They'd be doing great with whatever it
is that they wanted to do. But there is this
constant but I just know next week I'm not going
to be able to stick with.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
It right right right. That's interesting because that's not so
much putting it off until later, that's saying it's going
fine now, but I'm racked with anxiety about whether I
can keep it up. And amounts to the same thing, right,
which is that the real value, the real sort of
payoff moment in life where you get to say that
you did well or not is always in the future.
(17:39):
And if you live too completely in that way, you
just reinforce the idea that the meaning of life is
in the future. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Day seven kind of talks about this directly. Let the
future be the future. On crossing bridges when you come
to them.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
I write in that chapter about the moment not many
years ago when I finally felt like I understood what
cross bridges when you come to them means. People say
it all the time, is I will cross that bridge
when we come to it. Of course, you will only
cross that bridge when you come to it. There's no
other time that you can cross a bridge. But I
think that for the sort of habitually anxious and worrier
(18:13):
people like me, a lot of what is going on
with worry is this attempt to sort of achieve in
the present the security that would have come from crossing
all the bridges, from dealing with everything that could go
wrong in the future. And you know, it's useful to
prepare yourself for things that could go wrong. That's a
sort of old stoic technique. Isn't it right to sort
(18:34):
of think about what could go wrong so that you're
sort of mentally girded for it, But you can't ever
in the present have the security of knowing that you
survived something that happens in the future. That's just not
the kind of thing that humans get to experience because
one of the ways we're limited is we're sort of
temporarily limited, right, We're limited to this spot in time.
(18:55):
You can't sort of like just look over the fence
and see how it's going to be a weaker on
thre a year from now. And like all the things
I'm discussing in this book, or many of them, that
is both incredibly sort of stressful and depressing and requires
you to admit defeat in a way. And then as
soon as you begin to do so, you realize that
it's amazing. It's liberating, and it's energizing and it's empowering
(19:16):
because now you only have to care about the very
next moment. Ever, which is not to say that you
shouldn't sometimes use the very next moment to do some planning. Sure,
like you know, definitely write, will you know, make certain
kind of judicious plans in your life, but all you're
ever doing is using the next moment in whatever seems
(19:39):
like the most important, meaningful way. You're not sort of
pinning down the future so that you know it's all
going to be fine. And that's why worry is so repetitive, right,
because we're constantly trying to get to this place of
security about the future and then realizing like, no, we're
not going to get there. That's not how it works,
so we worry some more.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
I think one of the things that you do well
in the book is avoid the binaries, right, and it's
really easy to be in. I think one of two
binaries when people paint them right, one is just live
for the moment, now is all you have, and the
other is this idea of like make sure your future
self is totally set up for success. And you've actually
(20:38):
got one of the meditations that talks about your future self.
But it sounds like you're trying to sort of split
that difference between these. Maybe that's the wrong way to
say it, but to find some place between these binaries
that we often tend to.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, I mean, I think as always when there's a binary,
really it's like there's some sort of synthesis or transcendence
of those ideas that can usefully take place. And in
that context, yeah, I mean, I think live in the
moment very often means, you know, put all this effort
and self consciousness into trying to feel like all you're
doing is just sensing the world around you and not
(21:14):
caring about the future and not behaving in ways that
society deems responsible, but just really soaking it all up.
And in that sense, sure, that's an extreme, just as
a sort of fixation with your future self is an extreme.
On the other hand, the fact that we always are
only in the moment is just a brute fact of
being temporal, finite human beings. So the question then is
(21:36):
how much of those present moments you're going to use
for things that really only get their meaning in the future,
or whether you can make sure that there are things
you're doing in your life that have meaning in themselves,
perhaps meaning themselves and meaning for the future. And the
point in the section that you mentioned there that I'm
sort of addressing this directly is I think that a
(21:58):
lot of people who are sort of a t to
ideas like this read books on personal development, spirituality. Even
though many of them may pay a lot of lip
service to the idea of being present in the moment,
they're really focused on, almost to the exclusion of anything else,
on sort of becoming a different kind of person in
the future, on making sure that their future self thanks
(22:18):
them for the decisions they're making now so you can
it's quite easy, I think, from my experience and people
I've met, to sort of adopt a path of meditation
or non duality or you know, something that really does
try to sort of in its content is all about
being here now and just embark upon it as a
(22:38):
completely future oriented, goal focused process towards becoming a kind
of person that you like more than the person that
you are right now. Is quote at the very beginning
of the book that I use from Marion Woodman. It's
easier to try to be better than you are than
to be who you are, which I think is is
quite a powerful one. A lot of us, I don't
(23:00):
want to group anyone else in, but certainly me are
very prone to really deferring gratification too much, to saying
if I'm going to have a time in my life
when I can relax or just enjoy things, enjoy people,
enjoy being alive, Like that's got to come at the
end of this very long, arduous process of doing all
the things I'm obliged to do first.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
At the same time, you also in another chapter talk
about you can't hoard life like on letting the moment pass,
and this really resonated with me. Say more about what
you mean by that.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I think this is really in keeping with that, but
it is a different angle I'm writing there while I
begin in that section with this awareness that I've had
myself that even when good things are happening, to give
the example in the book, even when I'm sort of
living in a landscape I always wanted to live in,
walking at a beautiful day through beautiful countryside that I've
(23:53):
always loved, Like, there can be this thing that stops
you fully enjoying it, which is a desire to sort
of take ownership of it, or to convince yourself that
you're going to be able to have lots more of
this experience going on into the future, or really encode
it in your mind so that you can always remember it,
or just something that takes your way from the experience itself.
(24:13):
Buddhism is especially good on this right, that one of
the specific ways we make ourselves miserable is not just
that we don't yet have what we think we want,
or that we have things that we wish we didn't have.
It's that we do have what we did want right,
and cling so hard to it that it actually undermines
the sort of the resonance of that moment. So that's
what I'm referring to as hoarding life, whether it's busily
(24:35):
taking photos of the place you are to try to
keep it permanent, or if even just the thought that
I was having there, you know, Okay, I've got to
make sure that my life works such that I can
carry on having this kind of experience like every day
for the rest of my life or something. It's like, no,
that's not quite fully being in the experience.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Oh yeah, that's an experience. I've had so many times
where it's like all right, yeah, let's say I'm getting
ready to go on a beach vacation. It's like, I
just got to get to the beach. I just got
to get to you know, like when I get there,
So the whole day just kind of waiting to get there,
waiting to get there, and get there, walk out, have
about thirty seconds of like, oh wow, that's really beautiful
and amazing, and then in my brain immediately will say
(25:14):
something like I wonder what houses around here costs it?
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Right?
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Right, right, because I'm suddenly like I need to be
here all the time. But there's another flavor of this
that I get. You sort of talk about it by
saying that you fail to savor a moment in nature
because you're too focused on trying to savor it, which
is that I often have this moment of like, what's
the way to say this? It's the beautiful countryside there,
(25:39):
and I feel like a more evolved version of me
would be content with just what's right in front of me,
and I don't feel quite content with what's right in
front of me, So now I'm even further away from
being able to enjoy what's right in front of me.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, And I mean, you know, you can very easily
get into loup where you're then writing yourself up for
being like that, right, and it's like where before you
know it, you're just a huge mess. It's sort of
a twin process, isn't it, of sort of allowing yourself
to enjoy that experience just for itself, but also allowing
yourself to have all these kind of other parts of
you that want to do this. This is not a
(26:18):
unique argument at all, but I'm very big really on
the idea that it doesn't help to try to sort
of beat up or extinguish the parts of your personality
that are causing these sort of ridiculous situations. I think
what I'm sort of constantly hoping to indicate in the
book is like, they are a little absurd, right. It's
not that you should feel bad that you have something
in you that wanders about house prices. There's a great
(26:41):
power in being able to notice that that's quite funny
because the place from which you're laughing at that is
a very big and all encompassing space, right, And it's like, yeah,
on some level, you'll probably always have that kind of
thought anywhere that you're not living, that you go that
you enjoy being in. I mean that comes up in
(27:01):
another section, but that strategy that I'm borrowing from Bruce
Tift the psychotherapist, is like, you know, what if the
trait that you most deplore in yourself, what does it
feel like to imagine that you would have some version
of that for the rest of your life, never getting
rid of it. You're always going to have a little
bit of a tendency towards worry or being dissatisfied in
beautiful places, or easily distracted by nonsense, you know. And
(27:25):
I really find that a very relieving thought to imagine
that I might not eradicate that kind of issue because
it feels like, Okay, then I can give up that
fight and just spend my time and energy on things
that I care about instead of constantly struggling with something that,
on some level is just who I am.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
Yeah, this is one that I talk about on the
show a lot, because I was diagnosed with clinical depression
sometime in my late twenties after getting sober from heroin addiction,
and have thought about myself in those terms a lot.
But where I wrestle with all that is sort of
a version of what you're saying, which is like, what
if this is just how I am. I've referred to
(28:07):
it before as treating it a little bit like the
emotional flu like, oh, when it comes here, I get
it for a few days, and then it goes away, and
then it comes back, and just like just letting it
be instead of thinking that there should be some way
to change it or fix it. And I don't know
if you know. Andrew Solomon, he wrote a book called
The Noonday Demon and half that's a depression. But he
also wrote a book called Far from the Tree, and
(28:28):
the thing that stuck out from that book to me
the most was it's about children who often have some
sort of difference from their parents blindness or autism, or
if the parent knows that there's nothing that can be
done to change that condition, they get on with the
business of building the best possible life they can with
a child. And if, on the other hand, they absolutely
(28:50):
know it can be fixed, then they just focus on that.
But everybody else is caught in this middle.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Ground, not knowing if it can be fixed.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Not knowing if it can be fixed, and getting your
hopes up again and again because someone else comes down
the street saying I know how to fix that. I
can fix that. Maybe if you just date this way,
maybe if you just and so they end up in
this limbo where they're neither fully committed to changing it,
and they're also not fully committed to accepting it. And
I think a lot of things in life fall into
(29:20):
that middle ground which makes them hard.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah, and that is fascinating because obviously there's a kind
of a glib acceptance response to that that just says, well,
you know, acceptance is always the way, But that makes
no sense. If there's a really serious chance that you
can relieve your kid of a serious issue, that's crazy
to not try. So it comes down to that very
(29:42):
sort of subtle position of saying that you accept how
things are right now in this moment, including your desire
to make changes, including the possibility that the changes might
or might not work. There's a sort of level of
acceptance that I only occasionally glimpse myself that includes non acceptance.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Right in the book, several times you talk about this,
and you just use a similar reference to it a
couple of minutes ago, although I don't remember the exact words.
I think you're talking about making more and more space,
but you talk a lot about contraction and expansion as
ways of thinking about these ideas.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, I mean, one of these came up in four
thousand weeks, and I returned to it in this book,
which is the lovely line from James Hollis about asking
whether a certain life path or choice enlarges you or
diminishes you, instead of will it make me happy? Will
this be enlarging? And that's just very powerful because it
seems to connect intuitively to something a lot of people
(30:41):
really do get. There's a certain kind of attitude of
growth that you can take in life that will sometimes
take you through very happy and enjoyable things, but sometimes
through quite difficult terrain. And equally, there is a path
of pure hedonism you could take that sometimes might be meaningful,
but a lot of the time would be not meaningful,
even though it was sort of fun on the surface.
(31:02):
And so that question does this enlarged me or diminish me?
Is quite important. I mean, I've seen so many different
references to this all over the place from different sources.
But just that idea that what I'm doing wrong or
what I'm doing unwisely when I worry, when I feel
like I need to get into more control over the
world than I am, or anything like that is best
(31:24):
understood as some kind of clenching and for me, and
I think for a lot of people actually is accompanied
by sort of muscular tensions. That part of worrying about
something is like tightening the muscles in my face, and
that this is somehow girding me against the world in
a way that will keep me safe. And part of
worry for me certainly is always like in the bottom
(31:46):
of my stomach. That's where anxiety lives when it comes,
and it's all this kind of way of being braced
against reality, which is both unpleasant and kind of makes
no sense because you're just part of reality and you're
not going to be able to prevent events happening through
sort of that sort of bracing. So I think the
(32:08):
advice I'm giving in this book, which as ever, is
advice to myself as much as to anybody, is like,
maybe just relax in that very specific muscular sense a
little bit and see what it is to go through
life in that way instead.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Yeah, you mentioned nonduality earlier, and I studied with a
non dual teacher for a while by the name of
Adi Ashanti, and he said two things that were relevant
to this. One is he said that ego is nothing
but contraction, which I think is just sort of an
out there sort of phrase to contemplate, right. But the
other one was he said, you know, his teacher told
(32:41):
him at one point less of this, And I'm making
a fist right now and more of this I'm opening
my hand, and I like that because, like you said,
when I do that, I feel some sense of what
I'm trying to do psychically.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Totally, I really feel. I mean, I'm only at the
beginning of a journey of the sort of embodied and
somatic part of these ideas. But it's it really is
where the rubber hits the road. And I've even found,
you know, just to give a completely sort of self
absorbed example from writing and wanted to promote a book,
right it's like just what I'm doing in my life.
It really is true that the more I can just
(33:17):
enjoy myself, the better it goes for everybody, including the
readers that I'm addressing in my newsletter, including the I
hope the host of the podcast so who I'm talking
to right now, you know, just including book sales. Just
like all of it is not helped by this sort
of excess of furrowing one's brow and clenching one's fist
(33:39):
and trying to make it work out. And it's a
real leap of faith. The glibway of talking about is
it goes better when you don't really care about it,
and that makes it sound like you're being sort of irresponsible,
but actually, yeah, it goes better when you stand up
on a stage and mostly you're dedicated to just having
a good time, it goes better for other people.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode Integration reminder.
Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action
and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute
to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a
detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause
and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and
(34:45):
how can you put it into practice in your life. Seriously,
just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It
can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop
and be present, can't it. If you want to keep
this momentum going that you built with this little exercise,
i'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders
SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with
(35:06):
insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a
nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life,
and they're a helpful way to not get lost in
the busyness and forget what is important. You can join
at oneufeed dot net slash sms and if you don't
like them, you can get off a list really easily.
So far, there are over one and seventy two others
(35:28):
from the one you feed community on the list, and
we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on
over to oneufeed dot net slash sms and let's feed
our good wolves together. Let's turn in the next twenty
minutes or so to a couple more practical things that
are in the book. We've kind of been philosophical to
a large degree up till now, and I want to
(35:50):
get some of the great practical things that are in
the book out. And the first that I wanted to
talk about was this idea of too much information on
the art of reading and not reading. We are like
obsessed with getting more, knowing more, learning more, remembering more.
What are some ways to navigate this that are saying?
Speaker 1 (36:13):
I love this topic partly because you know, it's just
a big deal in my own life, the feeling that
there's too much that I need to read or should consume,
or that would be useful for me to digest, but
also because I think it really is a good example
of a much wider phenomenon. When it comes to being
a finite human. We are convinced that there must be
(36:36):
some way of getting to all the most important stuff,
and we feel bad because we haven't done so. So
it might not be that we get to read every
book that we think of, but it certainly is that
we should be able to at least make the right
choices and then make sure that the books we do read,
or the articles we do consume, or whatever it is,
are the ones that we really needed to consume and
(36:58):
the rest didn't really matter. Of course, the real problem
that we have in the modern world is that there's
far too much interesting, compelling, important stuff that does matter.
It's not that with a really good filter, you know,
with really good discernment, you can get rid of all
the stuff that you don't need to consume. It's that, actually,
you know, if you had forty eight hours in each
day and nothing to do but consume books and articles
and podcasts and videos, there would be enough good stuff,
(37:21):
important stuff to fill that time. And in that context,
the only sane way to approach the glut of information
is the metaphor uses to treat it like a river
rather than a bucket, right, So it's not something you're
trying to drain, it's not something you're trying to go
through every single item and at least consume the stuff
that really matters until the bucket is empty. It's just
(37:43):
this endless river of infinite stuff, and you're just picking
a few things that seize your interest and attention as
they go by, and you're not feeling bad about all
the things that flow by without you ever seeing them.
Because to feel bad in that context, to feel overwhelmed,
(38:03):
although it's very understandable and I don't want people to
beat themselves up for it, it is ultimately to believe
that you ought to have the capacities of a kind
of infinite being of a god. It really is a
sort of denial of what it actually means to be
a finite human, especially in the modern world, which is
to be just surrounded by so much more interesting stuff
to read. And that's just one example, right, could be
(38:25):
places to go people, to get to know, obligations, to
fulfill ambitions, to realize there's so much more that we
could ever get to do that. Actually, there's a little
bit of liberation to be there's a separate section of
the book where I talk about how like it's so
liberating to realize that these things are worse than you think.
Because if you think it's really bad, how many emails
(38:46):
you've got and that's going to be really hard to
answer them all. Or you think it's really bad, how
many books you feel you need to read, it's going
to be really hard to get through them all. That's
very stressful. But when you realize that it's worse than that,
and that it's completely impossible that you're never going to
make it through all the things that feel like they
need your time and attention not even close, then you
can just give up that fight and you can use
(39:06):
your time and your energy and your attention in ways
that really matter, which is going to be to make
some good enough choices about what to focus on and
move forward. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Absolutely, I love that River analogy. I think that's a
great one. And I think the other thing that comes
in here is also losing a belief that if we
just get the right book or the right article or
the right whatever, as you say, we're going to be
on top of it right, We're going to be fixed,
We're going to be fine, we're going to arrive at
(39:35):
some place. We just need to find the right one,
which is not really true because it doesn't matter what
we do. Is the point of the book being, You
never fully feel on top of it or complete, or
that you know everything's under control, because it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Right. What we're trying to do in all those moments, however,
forgivably and understandably, is sort of get up and out
of the situation in which we all are in as
finite humans, limited time, limited control, limited ability to know
what's coming next, or to even to understand other people. Right,
We're looking for some secret to sort of master the
(40:12):
situation of being a human, and we don't find it.
We spend a lot of our lives struggling to find it.
We beat ourselves up for not having found it, We
get sort of angry or jealous or envious of people
who we think have found it, and it's just not there,
because what it really is is a desire to renegotiate
the terms conditions of the human condition. And that's what
(40:34):
all those lovely zen phrases mean. When you know, Jockobeck says,
what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it
can be cured. And when mel Weitzman says, our suffering
is believing there's a way out, the problem is not
the problems. The problem is thinking that there ought to
be a complete solution to the problems.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Yeah. There's some version of a story where I don't
think it's an actual Buddhist tale, but it's this guy
who comes to the Buddha with all these problems, right,
it's just this list of problems, and the Buddhists found,
you know, like ninety nine problems, which is basically saying
infinite problems. He's like, I can't help you with any
of those, yeah, And the guy gets very frustrated and thinks,
(41:16):
why am I talking to someone so wise? And again
there's not an actual Buddhist story, but it's attributed that way.
Not think it is. And the Buddhist says, well, I
can help you with one problem, which is that you
think you shouldn't have problems.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Yeah, exactly. And there's a section in the book on
this idea of giving up hope of getting to the
problem free phase in life, which I contend you would
not actually want to be in if you did reach it,
that it would be kind of a death to have
a life with no problems. There are obviously very bad
problems that one hopes never to have to experience, and
(41:49):
there's nothing good about but that idea that a problem
is doubly problematic because there's the problem itself, and then
there's the fact that by this stage in my life
I ought to have figured things out so that I
don't have problems. You know, it's like an extraordinary recipe
for unnecessary self hate.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah, I had a conversation with I don't know how
it happened. My partner, Ginny, will just start conversations with
people wherever we go, and they go very deep, very quickly.
I'm like, how does she connect with these people like this?
But one of them was with this twenty five year
old American woman we were in Paris at the time,
who's living in Paris and feels like she just doesn't
(42:28):
know what she's doing, or that all of her friends
are ahead of her, or all these different things, And
a big part of the conversation was just like, I've
got bad news, which is that feeling it's not necessarily
going to go away. You're not like two years away
where you'll figure it out.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Right.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
I mean, I've got some disconcerting news to give you,
which is and I love you. Just sort of used
a phrase about renegotiate. I feel like we're always renegotiating.
We have to be the terms of reality, right. We
think we're going to get to a place where we
strike a deal and that's it, but it's not. Life
is an ongoing negotiation with reality.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Yeah, and the example that you give there, it's a
classic case of the liberation of seeing that it's worse
than you think, because yeah, it's a tormenting thing to
feel that imposter syndrome or you know, not that youthful
idea that other people understand life if they're a little
older than oneself. It's tormenting because you think it's somewhere
that you can get and you haven't got that yet.
(43:28):
But when you really let it sink into your bones
that no one ever gets there, or maybe that the
few people who really do think they know what they're
doing in life are the most dangerous and deluded on
the planet. That's kind of worse than you think because
it turns out it's not possible. But that's wonderful because
then you're just you're free you're free to just like
try things now because you don't need to postpone them
(43:49):
to this point at which you know what you're doing. Right.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, I'm not sure that those statements to her were
initially consoling. I think she's got a little bit more,
a little bit more of wrestle with that. That Oh, no,
you got to be kidding me, I'm going to was
not instantly liberating.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I don't think, no, no, none of this is instant
in my experience. Whatever certain zen masters say.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
Yes, yes, I'm just going to jump around at a
couple here set a quantity goal on firing your inner
quality controller, which is day twenty.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
This is part of a week of reflections on the
ways in which sometimes what we really need to do
is not make things happen in our lives to build
more meaningful ones, but just to let them happen, to
stand out of the way. And you know, born of
seeing this tendency in myself over and over again to
make things harder than they need to be, I'm coming
at it in this case through the lens of creativity
(44:43):
and talking about how difficult it is to in my
case write good stuff. When you're trying to write good stuff.
And this was an experience totally born out by this book,
because my last book had done a lot better than
I expected, and so naturally I had this predictable reaction
of being like paralyzed and thinking like, oh no, I've
got to read the same standard and if I mess
(45:03):
it up more people will see my humiliation or whatever.
And the first step through that was to let myself.
And it's not easy, right, it's sort of unpleasant at first,
but sort of let myself put quality to one side,
at least at first. Just write. Just do free writing
exercises where you said a time of for twenty minutes
and fill the page with words, all these things that,
(45:23):
to be quite honest, I had always deeply disdained. I'm like,
oh yeah, free writing exercises are for like amateurs. It's
like such bs, right, I just sit down and I
write them down. Not perfect, but it makes sense, you know.
And actually behind that kind of attitude there is something
a bit perfectionistic. It's not perfectionistic in terms of the
quality of the sentences, but it is perfectionistic in terms
(45:46):
of what mood I ought to be able to bring
up whenever I want to. And you know, This is
in the book, right, that seemingly great quote from Chuck
Close that's so famous, Like inspiration is for amateurs, the
rest of us just show up and get to working.
Really great about that, but there's also something really bad
about it, which is that implication that it doesn't matter
(46:06):
how you feel. You just get there and you write
good stuff or you paint good paintings or whatever, because
you're a professional. And actually, I think that what we
need to do very often in those situations is to
relax the quest for quality and the standards that we
hold ourselves to. And a very simple, down to earthway
to do that is, as I say, to set a
quantity goal, right, to make your creative practice about the
(46:31):
number of one hundred words you're going to put onto
a page or the number of minutes that you're going
to work on something for, and really to be careful
that that doesn't turn into I'm going to spend this
many minutes and do something really amazing, but that actually
completion for the day, the state of being done, the
state of having done what you showed up to do,
(46:52):
is measured totally, at least at first in those quantities,
because it really has a wonderful way of taking the
drama out of it, and it sort of obliges you
to trust processes that are bigger than you or or
beneath your consciousness. You have to say, look, I really
am going to write five hundred words a day, and
(47:14):
if I think the five hundred words I've written are terrible,
I'm going to write another five hundred words. I'm not
going to spend the next six months finessing that first
five hundred words. Now, I feel honor bound to add
that by the time I was actually writing this book
and editing it, I wasn't just free writing nonsense onto
the page. I don't think. I don't think it's full
of nonsense now, but it's absolutely critical at the beginning
(47:35):
to not really mind and to see that that sort
of little taskmaster inside you that is barking that this
isn't good enough and that you need to do better.
Like I'm sufficiently familiar with sort of internal family systems,
therapy and stuff to know that he does want the
best for you. He's not evil, but he really needs
to be sort of indulgently chuckled at rather than abade.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
I think the headline out of this is Berkman thinks's
latest book not much better than free writing exercises.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah, great positioning.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
Yeah you call them quantity goals. I refer to them
as effort goals. For me, I've been in the midst
of this with trying to write a book for myself. Now,
I've had the problem of having read a decade's worth
of books like this by many people who are extraordinarily
good authors. So I would consider you in that camp,
(48:29):
and that I know that what's coming out of me
isn't that good. And the phrase that I'll use is
yet And I have no idea can I write five
hundred words a day? Should I be writing with that?
I have no sense of any of it. So for me,
it's number of thirty minute sessions.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Yeah, it's just that.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
And if I get that done at the end of
the day, I do everything I can to just shut
off all the voices of doubt. And it's not good,
nothing good came out, and just be like I did it,
like I showed up and did my best for this
window of time. And that's just going to have to
be good enough for now.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
And the crazy part is I totally agree what is
represented by that attitude which is really engaging with reality,
which is, you know, putting aside perfectionistic fantasies in favor
of action that really matters. Like that will be in
the book just as a result of having approached it
in that way, right, right, separate from which words you
end up writing in the final draft, Like the book
(49:24):
will live and exude that in a way that I
don't even understand, right, I don't know how it works.
It seems a bit supernatural. But that sort of down
to earth approach I firmly believe will be reflected in
the sort of usefulness and ability to connect to people
that will be in the end product. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:39):
I imagine my editor is probably going to be like, Okay,
we've got the idea that writ in this book has
made you nervous, like we don't need it in like
every fifth sentence. Right.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
The other reason not to submit a perfect book is
you've got to give your editor something to do. Otherwise,
where's the meaning in your editor's life? Right, You've got
to give them something to get their teeth into and
send back and say do this differently.
Speaker 3 (49:59):
All right, let's end with a phrase that I really liked.
I'm just going to read a couple of sentences and
let you talk more about it. Striving towards sanity is
never going to work. You have to operate from sanity instead.
What does that mean.
Speaker 1 (50:16):
It means that whatever counts for you as the spirit
of the kind of life you want to live, and
when I think about myself, it's calm and energized, focused,
attentive and available for other people and sort of getting
important things actually done. All of that call that sanity
(50:39):
by my standards here in some sense, you have to
live from that identity right now and sort of manifest
that in the world, rather than viewing it as something
that you're working towards but that you can't have yet,
because if you define it in that way, that will
(51:01):
become a self fulfilling prophecy and you will never get
it because you're defining it as something that has to
be in the future. So that sounds very, very vague
and abstract. I think to make it a bit more concrete,
if you feel that at this point in your life,
as I do, a certain amount of more like rest
is probably appropriate than you've been granting yourself up to
(51:22):
this stage. Striving towards sanity would be saying, Okay, I
need to rest. I'm gonna take a sabbatical in a
year's time, and until then, I'm gonna you wouldn't necessarily
say it consciously to yourself, but right until then, I'm
going to work really really hard so that I've got
everything running and you know, the business is self sustaining
and everything's working. Out of your intuition that you need rest,
you start doing the exact opposite of resting, and reinforcing
(51:45):
all those parts of your psyche that think that what
you have to do in life is strive harder and
harder and harder. Starting from sanity, would be allowing yourself today,
maybe only for twenty minutes, maybe it doesn't feel very
great at first, but allowing yourself to take that a
little bit of rest, a little bit of enjoyment and
savoring of the world right here now. And there's lots
(52:07):
of other examples that don't necessarily apply to rest per se,
but it's that idea of finding some way to embody
the life you want to have now instead of working
towards some kind of amazing, full spectrum, perfect manifestation of
it that only comes later.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
Well, I think that is a great place for us
to wrap up. You and I are going to continue
in the Post Sho Conversation. We're going to talk about
distraction and interruption, what it means to be a good
person in this world, and answering the question of do
you really have to do that thing that you're convinced
you have to do. Listeners If you'd like access to
(52:48):
the Post SHO Conversation AD free episodes special episode I
do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem. And
you want to be part of supporting something that's important
to you, go to one u feed dot slash join
and we'd love to have you as part of our community. Oliver,
such a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
Thank you again, Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (53:24):
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(53:45):
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the show.
The reason that we struggle in life more than we
need to, or so I claim in this book and elsewhere,
is that we're trying to sort of transcend our limitations.
We're trying to get out of the condition of being
human instead of entering more fully into and almost kind
of harnessing in a sense, the condition of being fully human.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:47):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
and creative effort to make a life forth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
(01:21):
for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Oliver Berkman,
a British author and journalist, formerly writing the weekly column.
This column will Change your Life for the newspaper The Guardian.
Oliver is also the author of three books, including the
new one discussed here, Meditation for Mortals Four Weeks To
Embrace your limitations and make time for what counts.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Hi, Oliver, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Thanks very much for having me back.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah. I was saying to you before we started that
you were one of the first few interviews we ever did,
which was a decade ago, and I was so excited
when you said yes because the title of your book,
The Antidote Happiness for a Peace People who Hate Positive Thinking,
sounded like the book title I wish I had come
up with. So I was so excited to talk to
you then. And you've been on a couple times since
(02:07):
and I always enjoy speaking with you. We're going to
be discussing your latest book, which is called Meditation for
Mortals Four Weeks to Embrace your limitations and make time
for what counts. But before we get into that, we'll
start like we always do with the parable. In the parable,
there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
(02:27):
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops thinks about
it for a second. They look up at their grandparent
and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,
the one you feed. So I'd love to know how
(02:51):
that parable applies to you and your life and in
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
While I hope in my book and in my work
I have some sort of country intuitive interpretations of things,
I feel like what that says to me, certainly right
now is very feels very plain. It's just it's straightforward
and right and true. Which is that where you focus
your energy and your finite time and your finite attention
and all the rest of it is the life that
(03:16):
you create. I know from listening to the podcasts that
people have a wide variety of interpretations of this story,
But to me, that's just like, what could it mean
by that?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Yeah? On one level, it is very straightforward and very simple.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
And I don't say that as a criticism. Right right
I feel like at the place I'm at, certainly in
my career, certainly and probably life as a whole. It's like,
I don't want to shy away from the straightforward, obvious
thing if that happens to be the truth thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Absolutely. In your latest book, you're delving into something you're
calling imperfectionism. And I can't remember whether that's a term
you used in the previous book or you've started to
use it, but it's a good encapsulation for what this
book is about. What is imperfectionism?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
It really is, you know, an umbrella term for the
things I want to You've got to have a proprietary label, right, Yes, yes, welcome.
Gladwell would have got nowhere if you'd just said, like, well,
there's a threshold sometimes and on one side of the
threshold things behave different No, it's the tipping point. I'm kidding,
but I think it does identify something real. I guess
this book in terms of what it means for me,
(04:17):
it's a book about addressing the challenge because I myself
found myself constantly encountering this challenge of going from knowing
very well how you want to be living a more
meaningful life showing up for a more meaningfully productive, attentive, energized,
enjoyable life and like actually doing it, And in some ways,
(04:39):
even off the back of my last book, Four Thousand
Weeks Right, I felt like I had really understood something
as a result of writing that about what it means
to be finite and what it means to have such
limited time and limited ability to control the time that
we do get, but discovering that that doesn't automatically add
up to like, Okay, now you just live differently from
now on successfully because you've developed this so the book
(05:01):
and we can talk a bit about both the messages
in the book and kind of the structure of the book,
maybe because I think that's an important part of this
whole idea of going from thinking about actually doing them.
But essentially the answer to how do you go from
knowing the right thing to do to actually doing it
is the set of outlooks and techniques that I group
under imperfectionism. It is an approach that prefers taking action
(05:28):
right now, even if it feels like you don't quite
know what you're doing, or you're not sure if you're
going to be able to turn it into a long
term habit, or if you're not sure that the quality
of the work you produce are going to be any
good over these kind of long term schemes of fixing
all your problems, changing all your habits, setting up the
ideal morning routine, and becoming a different kind of person.
And I think that personal development and self help culture
(05:52):
and all the rest of it, while it has a
lot of useful stuff in it, can really end up
making this problem worse. Right, embarking on a path of
always being in the process of getting to the place
where you're going to feel in control at last, You're
going to feel in the driver's seat. You're going to
feel like you know what you're doing, or like you're
on top of all your demands and pleasing everybody, whatever
(06:12):
version of it it is for you. And so what
I wanted to do was really kind of zero in
on this question of like, well, that's not working, so
what does work right?
Speaker 3 (06:20):
And it is true that we face a lot of limitations,
and those limitations are different from person to person, But
I feel like one of the things that this show
has done over the years that gets reported back to me,
maybe more than anything else that's helpful is people realizing
that it's okay that they're struggling, or that things aren't easy,
(06:43):
or that there is difficulty in life, that that's just
to be human. You don't get out of that, right.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
I think you know two opposite things are true here
what you just said life is difficult, and then in
a certain sense, life is easier than we make it.
But they're connected because the reason that we struggle in
life more than we need to, or so I claim
in this book and elsewhere, is that we're trying to
sort of transcend our limitations. We're trying to get out
(07:10):
of the condition of being human instead of entering more
fully into and almost kind of harnessing in a sense,
the condition of being fully human. So, yeah, if you
stake your self worth on being able to answer any
number of emails and you're in a job where you're
getting an impossible number, then you are going to feel
very bad about yourself. If you can learn in certain
(07:30):
ways to understand that that is an impossible situation, that
meeting that sort of infinite demand is not on the
cards for a finite human, then you can actually you're
much more free to now focus on the important emails,
feel better about yourself, make some time for other things
in your life. So that kind of pattern repeats itself
again and again. I feel like in what I'm writing about,
(07:50):
it's the struggle to get out of our our built
in limitations that causes the extra layer of difficulty. And
that's kind of the same point as saying that it's
difficult and there are problems right with being a human.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, Oftentimes I just think of it as like, how
do I not this sounds pessimistic, but how do I
not make things worse? Right, like by thinking that I
should be able to fix this, or I should be
able to do this, and that there's something wrong with
me when I can't right right?
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Yeah, absolutely, And that.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Mobility, like you're saying to just embrace that doesn't make
the difficult stuff go away, but it certainly stops us from,
you know, at least in my case, compounding, right, the difficulty.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
It stops you from compounding the difficulty, and it sort
of allows you to live in a way that honors
all that stuff as a part of your life, and
that makes it meaningful. Now it's easy to say, and
you know, I'm always a wary of somebody listening who's
you know, recently experienced a tragedy far greater than any
I've experienced. Yet, so that was saying, you know, well,
(08:56):
that's easy to say, but I think it is true.
I think life can make it harder to accept or easier,
depending on your situation. But it is true that once
you're no longer treating life as a problem to be solved,
that's when the problems that it will throw you away
all the time unendingly can become sources of meaning instead
(09:19):
of things that you have to somehow get rid of.
And you're a failure because you haven't yet reached the
part of your life that has no problems in it.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
You talk a lot about how if we try and
control the world that a that's not a strategy that
often works, right, because it just slides right out of
our hands. Yeah, but that furthermore, the attempt to control
dens us to our lives. You use a phrase, I
(09:46):
don't know who it is, but the life loses its resonance.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
This is a think a German thinking called hartmut Rosa
who whose work sort of blew my mind when I
encountered it, especially because it's in such a sort of
academic setting. You don't expect to be so incredibly useful
and illuminating in a personal sense. But this is just
from my own experience right as a kind of somewhat insecure,
quite driven, slightly fixated on productivity and efficiency type person,
(10:16):
you're engaged in this effort to make life feel okay
by exerting more control over it, by feeling like you're
on top of things, by feeling like you're keeping track
of everything, or that you've optimized yourself so well that
you can handle everything that's thrown at you. And sure,
a lot of time it just doesn't work. And I
wrote a little bit in my previous book about how
getting really good at answering email just means you get
(10:37):
more email and doesn't actually leave you more in charge
of things at all. But also, yeah, and this is
where hartmut Rose's work was so important. It squeezes the
thing that makes life worth living out of life. It
makes things feel less resonant. His term is resonance, and
he's referring to the way that not that we should
just sort of give up attempting to have any influence
over life. That's taking things too far in the other direction,
(10:59):
but that really organizing both our lives and our societies
on some level as efforts to expand our control over
things predictably has this unintended consequence of making them feel
not enjoyable or meaningful anymore. So quick couple of examples,
(11:21):
I might be helpful, you know. I know that I'm
not alone in among sort of productivity geek people in
having this experience of coming across some exciting new system
for setting goals in life and coming up with like
what you're going to do in the next ninety days
or the next year, and making it all really specific
and breaking it all down into the steps, and feeling
so excited about it on like Monday, drawing up the schedule,
(11:42):
and by Tuesday or Wednesday, this is like the worst
thing in the world, right. It just feels completely oppressive,
this prison that you've built for yourself in an effort
to get control over your life, because now it feels
like you've just got to follow these steps and there's
no sort of real intuitive engagement with the moment anymore.
It's just like carrying out all these these tasks that
(12:04):
this jerk, namely me, two days ago, has instructed me
to carry out, but right to the other end of
the scale, just quickly. I don't know anyone has either
got experience of working in or knows people who work
in education, healthcare, sort of government, social services, things like that.
And this is a heart Moros's point. In all these
sectors of work now, people complain all the time that
(12:25):
they can't do their jobs because there's so much documentation
and paperwork around doing their jobs. They have to spend
so much time accounting for themselves and recording things that
they don't get to do those moments of human connection
where the work really gets done. And he points out
this is companies and governments wanting to make everything controllable
and visible and predictable in a somewhat similar way to
(12:47):
the productivity geek really and as a result, making it
harder for a teacher and a pupil to connect, or
for a social worker and a client to actually have
a moment of you know, getting to the core of
what the problem is or something like that, because of
this fixation on control. So I was really interested in
the way that seems to apply both to my sort
of day to day routines and to whole swathes of
(13:08):
society at the same time.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
So this new book, Meditations for Mortals, is four weeks
of reflections that we can do to help us, I
would say, internalize some of these ideas and as you
said earlier, help us maybe live some of them out.
Why that structure.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
I really wanted if I was going to write a
book that was about this challenge of actually living differently
instead of just thinking about it and planning to do it,
I wanted to make sure that the book, as far
as any book could and there are limitations there, but
embodied that right that it didn't turn into some new
system that you could read and store away in your
(13:48):
head and then put into practice one day when you
get a spare moment, because there aren't any spare moments.
When did you lost get a spare moment? Ridiculous? So
I wanted the book to be something that people could read. Again,
you don't have to follow mine instructions, but the invitation
is that you read one of these short chapters each day,
take a few minutes, and if some of those sort
of shifts and perspective or those suggested tools and techniques
(14:09):
work for you, that's going to change, in a small
way how you live that day. Not some big charactery
invention that you're going to get involved in six months
from now, but just on the day to day texture
of life, and on the level of what I'm explicitly
saying in those chapters as well, I'm sort of constantly
pulling the rug I hope under away from any attempt
(14:30):
to say, Okay, this is great, I'm going to note
it down and have a whole new system of habits.
It's like, no, just do this one thing today, because
it's actually quite hard to do that for a certain
kind of person of whom I am to just try
it once, to just behave a little bit differently in
a positive sense towards one person, without having any confidence
(14:53):
that you're going to make this stick or keep it
up as a regular habit or anything like that. And
so that's what I'm really trying to d home every day,
and then the four weeks sort of build on each other. Right,
So there intended to be a bit of a journey
from starting more philosophically, getting quite concrete, and then ending
a bit more philosophically again.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I guess the thing about habits is that we know
repetition can be a very positive thing, right if we're
pointed in the right direction, A habit can be beneficial
to us because it just sort of allows a good
behavior to happen a little bit easier, and at the
same time they can be deadening, right, just go through
(15:32):
the motions. It's sort of interviewed a guy I don't know,
Michael Norton, who wrote a book about rituals. But the
core idea, which is just that habits almost have the
meaning sucked out of them. You don't think about the
meaning because you just do the thing. And again it's
good and bad. But a ritual is an action that
you take that you're trying to imbue with emotions specifically.
(15:52):
And so I love this idea that you're pointing at,
which is you don't have to do something again and
again and again and every day to have value.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Right. That is absolutely right. And you know, the other
thing I would add is that very often, I think, certainly,
if I examine in my own life the habits that
have stuck, what happened was that they emerged through that
process of just doing it sometimes right. They They were
not always these sort of top down willed efforts at
exerting control over how I lived my life. And so
(16:24):
I'm not even in some level making a point against habits.
I'm just making a point about how habits can emerge.
Everything has to start with a willingness to just right
now do something that feels meaningful for ten minutes. You
know one thing, and I guess part of this point
of this book is is a reaction to seeing in me,
as much as in anybody else, the incredible sort of
(16:44):
seductiveness of not doing that. It makes you feel much
more secure on some level to believe that you're involved
in a process of reaching towards perfection but you're not
there yet, than to say, actually, I'm just going to
live a little bit differently today.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
Which is ultimately all you can do, because you can't
live next Thursday. You can only live today, right, and
you can only take action today. And it's overly obvious.
But when I was coaching people, I would the same
thing would happen. They'd be doing great with whatever it
is that they wanted to do. But there is this
constant but I just know next week I'm not going
to be able to stick with.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
It right right right. That's interesting because that's not so
much putting it off until later, that's saying it's going
fine now, but I'm racked with anxiety about whether I
can keep it up. And amounts to the same thing, right,
which is that the real value, the real sort of
payoff moment in life where you get to say that
you did well or not is always in the future.
(17:39):
And if you live too completely in that way, you
just reinforce the idea that the meaning of life is
in the future. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Day seven kind of talks about this directly. Let the
future be the future. On crossing bridges when you come
to them.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
I write in that chapter about the moment not many
years ago when I finally felt like I understood what
cross bridges when you come to them means. People say
it all the time, is I will cross that bridge
when we come to it. Of course, you will only
cross that bridge when you come to it. There's no
other time that you can cross a bridge. But I
think that for the sort of habitually anxious and worrier
(18:13):
people like me, a lot of what is going on
with worry is this attempt to sort of achieve in
the present the security that would have come from crossing
all the bridges, from dealing with everything that could go
wrong in the future. And you know, it's useful to
prepare yourself for things that could go wrong. That's a
sort of old stoic technique. Isn't it right to sort
(18:34):
of think about what could go wrong so that you're
sort of mentally girded for it, But you can't ever
in the present have the security of knowing that you
survived something that happens in the future. That's just not
the kind of thing that humans get to experience because
one of the ways we're limited is we're sort of
temporarily limited, right, We're limited to this spot in time.
(18:55):
You can't sort of like just look over the fence
and see how it's going to be a weaker on
thre a year from now. And like all the things
I'm discussing in this book, or many of them, that
is both incredibly sort of stressful and depressing and requires
you to admit defeat in a way. And then as
soon as you begin to do so, you realize that
it's amazing. It's liberating, and it's energizing and it's empowering
(19:16):
because now you only have to care about the very
next moment. Ever, which is not to say that you
shouldn't sometimes use the very next moment to do some planning. Sure,
like you know, definitely write, will you know, make certain
kind of judicious plans in your life, but all you're
ever doing is using the next moment in whatever seems
(19:39):
like the most important, meaningful way. You're not sort of
pinning down the future so that you know it's all
going to be fine. And that's why worry is so repetitive, right,
because we're constantly trying to get to this place of
security about the future and then realizing like, no, we're
not going to get there. That's not how it works,
so we worry some more.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
I think one of the things that you do well
in the book is avoid the binaries, right, and it's
really easy to be in. I think one of two
binaries when people paint them right, one is just live
for the moment, now is all you have, and the
other is this idea of like make sure your future
self is totally set up for success. And you've actually
(20:38):
got one of the meditations that talks about your future self.
But it sounds like you're trying to sort of split
that difference between these. Maybe that's the wrong way to
say it, but to find some place between these binaries
that we often tend to.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, I mean, I think as always when there's a binary,
really it's like there's some sort of synthesis or transcendence
of those ideas that can usefully take place. And in
that context, yeah, I mean, I think live in the
moment very often means, you know, put all this effort
and self consciousness into trying to feel like all you're
doing is just sensing the world around you and not
(21:14):
caring about the future and not behaving in ways that
society deems responsible, but just really soaking it all up.
And in that sense, sure, that's an extreme, just as
a sort of fixation with your future self is an extreme.
On the other hand, the fact that we always are
only in the moment is just a brute fact of
being temporal, finite human beings. So the question then is
(21:36):
how much of those present moments you're going to use
for things that really only get their meaning in the future,
or whether you can make sure that there are things
you're doing in your life that have meaning in themselves,
perhaps meaning themselves and meaning for the future. And the
point in the section that you mentioned there that I'm
sort of addressing this directly is I think that a
(21:58):
lot of people who are sort of a t to
ideas like this read books on personal development, spirituality. Even
though many of them may pay a lot of lip
service to the idea of being present in the moment,
they're really focused on, almost to the exclusion of anything else,
on sort of becoming a different kind of person in
the future, on making sure that their future self thanks
(22:18):
them for the decisions they're making now so you can
it's quite easy, I think, from my experience and people
I've met, to sort of adopt a path of meditation
or non duality or you know, something that really does
try to sort of in its content is all about
being here now and just embark upon it as a
(22:38):
completely future oriented, goal focused process towards becoming a kind
of person that you like more than the person that
you are right now. Is quote at the very beginning
of the book that I use from Marion Woodman. It's
easier to try to be better than you are than
to be who you are, which I think is is
quite a powerful one. A lot of us, I don't
(23:00):
want to group anyone else in, but certainly me are
very prone to really deferring gratification too much, to saying
if I'm going to have a time in my life
when I can relax or just enjoy things, enjoy people,
enjoy being alive, Like that's got to come at the
end of this very long, arduous process of doing all
the things I'm obliged to do first.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
At the same time, you also in another chapter talk
about you can't hoard life like on letting the moment pass,
and this really resonated with me. Say more about what
you mean by that.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I think this is really in keeping with that, but
it is a different angle I'm writing there while I
begin in that section with this awareness that I've had
myself that even when good things are happening, to give
the example in the book, even when I'm sort of
living in a landscape I always wanted to live in,
walking at a beautiful day through beautiful countryside that I've
(23:53):
always loved, Like, there can be this thing that stops
you fully enjoying it, which is a desire to sort
of take ownership of it, or to convince yourself that
you're going to be able to have lots more of
this experience going on into the future, or really encode
it in your mind so that you can always remember it,
or just something that takes your way from the experience itself.
(24:13):
Buddhism is especially good on this right, that one of
the specific ways we make ourselves miserable is not just
that we don't yet have what we think we want,
or that we have things that we wish we didn't have.
It's that we do have what we did want right,
and cling so hard to it that it actually undermines
the sort of the resonance of that moment. So that's
what I'm referring to as hoarding life, whether it's busily
(24:35):
taking photos of the place you are to try to
keep it permanent, or if even just the thought that
I was having there, you know, Okay, I've got to
make sure that my life works such that I can
carry on having this kind of experience like every day
for the rest of my life or something. It's like, no,
that's not quite fully being in the experience.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Oh yeah, that's an experience. I've had so many times
where it's like all right, yeah, let's say I'm getting
ready to go on a beach vacation. It's like, I
just got to get to the beach. I just got
to get to you know, like when I get there,
So the whole day just kind of waiting to get there,
waiting to get there, and get there, walk out, have
about thirty seconds of like, oh wow, that's really beautiful
and amazing, and then in my brain immediately will say
(25:14):
something like I wonder what houses around here costs it?
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Right?
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Right, right, because I'm suddenly like I need to be
here all the time. But there's another flavor of this
that I get. You sort of talk about it by
saying that you fail to savor a moment in nature
because you're too focused on trying to savor it, which
is that I often have this moment of like, what's
the way to say this? It's the beautiful countryside there,
(25:39):
and I feel like a more evolved version of me
would be content with just what's right in front of me,
and I don't feel quite content with what's right in
front of me, So now I'm even further away from
being able to enjoy what's right in front of me.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, And I mean, you know, you can very easily
get into loup where you're then writing yourself up for
being like that, right, and it's like where before you
know it, you're just a huge mess. It's sort of
a twin process, isn't it, of sort of allowing yourself
to enjoy that experience just for itself, but also allowing
yourself to have all these kind of other parts of
you that want to do this. This is not a
(26:18):
unique argument at all, but I'm very big really on
the idea that it doesn't help to try to sort
of beat up or extinguish the parts of your personality
that are causing these sort of ridiculous situations. I think
what I'm sort of constantly hoping to indicate in the
book is like, they are a little absurd, right. It's
not that you should feel bad that you have something
in you that wanders about house prices. There's a great
(26:41):
power in being able to notice that that's quite funny
because the place from which you're laughing at that is
a very big and all encompassing space, right, And it's like, yeah,
on some level, you'll probably always have that kind of
thought anywhere that you're not living, that you go that
you enjoy being in. I mean that comes up in
(27:01):
another section, but that strategy that I'm borrowing from Bruce
Tift the psychotherapist, is like, you know, what if the
trait that you most deplore in yourself, what does it
feel like to imagine that you would have some version
of that for the rest of your life, never getting
rid of it. You're always going to have a little
bit of a tendency towards worry or being dissatisfied in
beautiful places, or easily distracted by nonsense, you know. And
(27:25):
I really find that a very relieving thought to imagine
that I might not eradicate that kind of issue because
it feels like, Okay, then I can give up that
fight and just spend my time and energy on things
that I care about instead of constantly struggling with something that,
on some level is just who I am.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
Yeah, this is one that I talk about on the
show a lot, because I was diagnosed with clinical depression
sometime in my late twenties after getting sober from heroin addiction,
and have thought about myself in those terms a lot.
But where I wrestle with all that is sort of
a version of what you're saying, which is like, what
if this is just how I am. I've referred to
(28:07):
it before as treating it a little bit like the
emotional flu like, oh, when it comes here, I get
it for a few days, and then it goes away, and
then it comes back, and just like just letting it
be instead of thinking that there should be some way
to change it or fix it. And I don't know
if you know. Andrew Solomon, he wrote a book called
The Noonday Demon and half that's a depression. But he
also wrote a book called Far from the Tree, and
(28:28):
the thing that stuck out from that book to me
the most was it's about children who often have some
sort of difference from their parents blindness or autism, or
if the parent knows that there's nothing that can be
done to change that condition, they get on with the
business of building the best possible life they can with
a child. And if, on the other hand, they absolutely
(28:50):
know it can be fixed, then they just focus on that.
But everybody else is caught in this middle.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Ground, not knowing if it can be fixed.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Not knowing if it can be fixed, and getting your
hopes up again and again because someone else comes down
the street saying I know how to fix that. I
can fix that. Maybe if you just date this way,
maybe if you just and so they end up in
this limbo where they're neither fully committed to changing it,
and they're also not fully committed to accepting it. And
I think a lot of things in life fall into
(29:20):
that middle ground which makes them hard.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah, and that is fascinating because obviously there's a kind
of a glib acceptance response to that that just says, well,
you know, acceptance is always the way, But that makes
no sense. If there's a really serious chance that you
can relieve your kid of a serious issue, that's crazy
to not try. So it comes down to that very
(29:42):
sort of subtle position of saying that you accept how
things are right now in this moment, including your desire
to make changes, including the possibility that the changes might
or might not work. There's a sort of level of
acceptance that I only occasionally glimpse myself that includes non acceptance.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Right in the book, several times you talk about this,
and you just use a similar reference to it a
couple of minutes ago, although I don't remember the exact words.
I think you're talking about making more and more space,
but you talk a lot about contraction and expansion as
ways of thinking about these ideas.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, I mean, one of these came up in four
thousand weeks, and I returned to it in this book,
which is the lovely line from James Hollis about asking
whether a certain life path or choice enlarges you or
diminishes you, instead of will it make me happy? Will
this be enlarging? And that's just very powerful because it
seems to connect intuitively to something a lot of people
(30:41):
really do get. There's a certain kind of attitude of
growth that you can take in life that will sometimes
take you through very happy and enjoyable things, but sometimes
through quite difficult terrain. And equally, there is a path
of pure hedonism you could take that sometimes might be meaningful,
but a lot of the time would be not meaningful,
even though it was sort of fun on the surface.
(31:02):
And so that question does this enlarged me or diminish me?
Is quite important. I mean, I've seen so many different
references to this all over the place from different sources.
But just that idea that what I'm doing wrong or
what I'm doing unwisely when I worry, when I feel
like I need to get into more control over the
world than I am, or anything like that is best
(31:24):
understood as some kind of clenching and for me, and
I think for a lot of people actually is accompanied
by sort of muscular tensions. That part of worrying about
something is like tightening the muscles in my face, and
that this is somehow girding me against the world in
a way that will keep me safe. And part of
worry for me certainly is always like in the bottom
(31:46):
of my stomach. That's where anxiety lives when it comes,
and it's all this kind of way of being braced
against reality, which is both unpleasant and kind of makes
no sense because you're just part of reality and you're
not going to be able to prevent events happening through
sort of that sort of bracing. So I think the
(32:08):
advice I'm giving in this book, which as ever, is
advice to myself as much as to anybody, is like,
maybe just relax in that very specific muscular sense a
little bit and see what it is to go through
life in that way instead.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Yeah, you mentioned nonduality earlier, and I studied with a
non dual teacher for a while by the name of
Adi Ashanti, and he said two things that were relevant
to this. One is he said that ego is nothing
but contraction, which I think is just sort of an
out there sort of phrase to contemplate, right. But the
other one was he said, you know, his teacher told
(32:41):
him at one point less of this, And I'm making
a fist right now and more of this I'm opening
my hand, and I like that because, like you said,
when I do that, I feel some sense of what
I'm trying to do psychically.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Totally, I really feel. I mean, I'm only at the
beginning of a journey of the sort of embodied and
somatic part of these ideas. But it's it really is
where the rubber hits the road. And I've even found,
you know, just to give a completely sort of self
absorbed example from writing and wanted to promote a book,
right it's like just what I'm doing in my life.
It really is true that the more I can just
(33:17):
enjoy myself, the better it goes for everybody, including the
readers that I'm addressing in my newsletter, including the I
hope the host of the podcast so who I'm talking
to right now, you know, just including book sales. Just
like all of it is not helped by this sort
of excess of furrowing one's brow and clenching one's fist
(33:39):
and trying to make it work out. And it's a
real leap of faith. The glibway of talking about is
it goes better when you don't really care about it,
and that makes it sound like you're being sort of irresponsible,
but actually, yeah, it goes better when you stand up
on a stage and mostly you're dedicated to just having
a good time, it goes better for other people.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode Integration reminder.
Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action
and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute
to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a
detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause
and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and
(34:45):
how can you put it into practice in your life. Seriously,
just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It
can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop
and be present, can't it. If you want to keep
this momentum going that you built with this little exercise,
i'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders
SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with
(35:06):
insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a
nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life,
and they're a helpful way to not get lost in
the busyness and forget what is important. You can join
at oneufeed dot net slash sms and if you don't
like them, you can get off a list really easily.
So far, there are over one and seventy two others
(35:28):
from the one you feed community on the list, and
we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on
over to oneufeed dot net slash sms and let's feed
our good wolves together. Let's turn in the next twenty
minutes or so to a couple more practical things that
are in the book. We've kind of been philosophical to
a large degree up till now, and I want to
(35:50):
get some of the great practical things that are in
the book out. And the first that I wanted to
talk about was this idea of too much information on
the art of reading and not reading. We are like
obsessed with getting more, knowing more, learning more, remembering more.
What are some ways to navigate this that are saying?
Speaker 1 (36:13):
I love this topic partly because you know, it's just
a big deal in my own life, the feeling that
there's too much that I need to read or should consume,
or that would be useful for me to digest, but
also because I think it really is a good example
of a much wider phenomenon. When it comes to being
a finite human. We are convinced that there must be
(36:36):
some way of getting to all the most important stuff,
and we feel bad because we haven't done so. So
it might not be that we get to read every
book that we think of, but it certainly is that
we should be able to at least make the right
choices and then make sure that the books we do read,
or the articles we do consume, or whatever it is,
are the ones that we really needed to consume and
(36:58):
the rest didn't really matter. Of course, the real problem
that we have in the modern world is that there's
far too much interesting, compelling, important stuff that does matter.
It's not that with a really good filter, you know,
with really good discernment, you can get rid of all
the stuff that you don't need to consume. It's that, actually,
you know, if you had forty eight hours in each
day and nothing to do but consume books and articles
and podcasts and videos, there would be enough good stuff,
(37:21):
important stuff to fill that time. And in that context,
the only sane way to approach the glut of information
is the metaphor uses to treat it like a river
rather than a bucket, right, So it's not something you're
trying to drain, it's not something you're trying to go
through every single item and at least consume the stuff
that really matters until the bucket is empty. It's just
(37:43):
this endless river of infinite stuff, and you're just picking
a few things that seize your interest and attention as
they go by, and you're not feeling bad about all
the things that flow by without you ever seeing them.
Because to feel bad in that context, to feel overwhelmed,
(38:03):
although it's very understandable and I don't want people to
beat themselves up for it, it is ultimately to believe
that you ought to have the capacities of a kind
of infinite being of a god. It really is a
sort of denial of what it actually means to be
a finite human, especially in the modern world, which is
to be just surrounded by so much more interesting stuff
to read. And that's just one example, right, could be
(38:25):
places to go people, to get to know, obligations, to
fulfill ambitions, to realize there's so much more that we
could ever get to do that. Actually, there's a little
bit of liberation to be there's a separate section of
the book where I talk about how like it's so
liberating to realize that these things are worse than you think.
Because if you think it's really bad, how many emails
(38:46):
you've got and that's going to be really hard to
answer them all. Or you think it's really bad, how
many books you feel you need to read, it's going
to be really hard to get through them all. That's
very stressful. But when you realize that it's worse than that,
and that it's completely impossible that you're never going to
make it through all the things that feel like they
need your time and attention not even close, then you
can just give up that fight and you can use
(39:06):
your time and your energy and your attention in ways
that really matter, which is going to be to make
some good enough choices about what to focus on and
move forward. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Absolutely, I love that River analogy. I think that's a
great one. And I think the other thing that comes
in here is also losing a belief that if we
just get the right book or the right article or
the right whatever, as you say, we're going to be
on top of it right, We're going to be fixed,
We're going to be fine, we're going to arrive at
(39:35):
some place. We just need to find the right one,
which is not really true because it doesn't matter what
we do. Is the point of the book being, You
never fully feel on top of it or complete, or
that you know everything's under control, because it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Right. What we're trying to do in all those moments, however,
forgivably and understandably, is sort of get up and out
of the situation in which we all are in as
finite humans, limited time, limited control, limited ability to know
what's coming next, or to even to understand other people. Right,
We're looking for some secret to sort of master the
(40:12):
situation of being a human, and we don't find it.
We spend a lot of our lives struggling to find it.
We beat ourselves up for not having found it, We
get sort of angry or jealous or envious of people
who we think have found it, and it's just not there,
because what it really is is a desire to renegotiate
the terms conditions of the human condition. And that's what
(40:34):
all those lovely zen phrases mean. When you know, Jockobeck says,
what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it
can be cured. And when mel Weitzman says, our suffering
is believing there's a way out, the problem is not
the problems. The problem is thinking that there ought to
be a complete solution to the problems.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Yeah. There's some version of a story where I don't
think it's an actual Buddhist tale, but it's this guy
who comes to the Buddha with all these problems, right,
it's just this list of problems, and the Buddhists found,
you know, like ninety nine problems, which is basically saying
infinite problems. He's like, I can't help you with any
of those, yeah, And the guy gets very frustrated and thinks,
(41:16):
why am I talking to someone so wise? And again
there's not an actual Buddhist story, but it's attributed that way.
Not think it is. And the Buddhist says, well, I
can help you with one problem, which is that you
think you shouldn't have problems.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Yeah, exactly. And there's a section in the book on
this idea of giving up hope of getting to the
problem free phase in life, which I contend you would
not actually want to be in if you did reach it,
that it would be kind of a death to have
a life with no problems. There are obviously very bad
problems that one hopes never to have to experience, and
(41:49):
there's nothing good about but that idea that a problem
is doubly problematic because there's the problem itself, and then
there's the fact that by this stage in my life
I ought to have figured things out so that I
don't have problems. You know, it's like an extraordinary recipe
for unnecessary self hate.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah, I had a conversation with I don't know how
it happened. My partner, Ginny, will just start conversations with
people wherever we go, and they go very deep, very quickly.
I'm like, how does she connect with these people like this?
But one of them was with this twenty five year
old American woman we were in Paris at the time,
who's living in Paris and feels like she just doesn't
(42:28):
know what she's doing, or that all of her friends
are ahead of her, or all these different things, And
a big part of the conversation was just like, I've
got bad news, which is that feeling it's not necessarily
going to go away. You're not like two years away
where you'll figure it out.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Right.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
I mean, I've got some disconcerting news to give you,
which is and I love you. Just sort of used
a phrase about renegotiate. I feel like we're always renegotiating.
We have to be the terms of reality, right. We
think we're going to get to a place where we
strike a deal and that's it, but it's not. Life
is an ongoing negotiation with reality.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Yeah, and the example that you give there, it's a
classic case of the liberation of seeing that it's worse
than you think, because yeah, it's a tormenting thing to
feel that imposter syndrome or you know, not that youthful
idea that other people understand life if they're a little
older than oneself. It's tormenting because you think it's somewhere
that you can get and you haven't got that yet.
(43:28):
But when you really let it sink into your bones
that no one ever gets there, or maybe that the
few people who really do think they know what they're
doing in life are the most dangerous and deluded on
the planet. That's kind of worse than you think because
it turns out it's not possible. But that's wonderful because
then you're just you're free you're free to just like
try things now because you don't need to postpone them
(43:49):
to this point at which you know what you're doing. Right.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, I'm not sure that those statements to her were
initially consoling. I think she's got a little bit more,
a little bit more of wrestle with that. That Oh, no,
you got to be kidding me, I'm going to was
not instantly liberating.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I don't think, no, no, none of this is instant
in my experience. Whatever certain zen masters say.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
Yes, yes, I'm just going to jump around at a
couple here set a quantity goal on firing your inner
quality controller, which is day twenty.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
This is part of a week of reflections on the
ways in which sometimes what we really need to do
is not make things happen in our lives to build
more meaningful ones, but just to let them happen, to
stand out of the way. And you know, born of
seeing this tendency in myself over and over again to
make things harder than they need to be, I'm coming
at it in this case through the lens of creativity
(44:43):
and talking about how difficult it is to in my
case write good stuff. When you're trying to write good stuff.
And this was an experience totally born out by this book,
because my last book had done a lot better than
I expected, and so naturally I had this predictable reaction
of being like paralyzed and thinking like, oh no, I've
got to read the same standard and if I mess
(45:03):
it up more people will see my humiliation or whatever.
And the first step through that was to let myself.
And it's not easy, right, it's sort of unpleasant at first,
but sort of let myself put quality to one side,
at least at first. Just write. Just do free writing
exercises where you said a time of for twenty minutes
and fill the page with words, all these things that,
(45:23):
to be quite honest, I had always deeply disdained. I'm like,
oh yeah, free writing exercises are for like amateurs. It's
like such bs, right, I just sit down and I
write them down. Not perfect, but it makes sense, you know.
And actually behind that kind of attitude there is something
a bit perfectionistic. It's not perfectionistic in terms of the
quality of the sentences, but it is perfectionistic in terms
(45:46):
of what mood I ought to be able to bring
up whenever I want to. And you know, This is
in the book, right, that seemingly great quote from Chuck
Close that's so famous, Like inspiration is for amateurs, the
rest of us just show up and get to working.
Really great about that, but there's also something really bad
about it, which is that implication that it doesn't matter
(46:06):
how you feel. You just get there and you write
good stuff or you paint good paintings or whatever, because
you're a professional. And actually, I think that what we
need to do very often in those situations is to
relax the quest for quality and the standards that we
hold ourselves to. And a very simple, down to earthway
to do that is, as I say, to set a
quantity goal, right, to make your creative practice about the
(46:31):
number of one hundred words you're going to put onto
a page or the number of minutes that you're going
to work on something for, and really to be careful
that that doesn't turn into I'm going to spend this
many minutes and do something really amazing, but that actually
completion for the day, the state of being done, the
state of having done what you showed up to do,
(46:52):
is measured totally, at least at first in those quantities,
because it really has a wonderful way of taking the
drama out of it, and it sort of obliges you
to trust processes that are bigger than you or or
beneath your consciousness. You have to say, look, I really
am going to write five hundred words a day, and
(47:14):
if I think the five hundred words I've written are terrible,
I'm going to write another five hundred words. I'm not
going to spend the next six months finessing that first
five hundred words. Now, I feel honor bound to add
that by the time I was actually writing this book
and editing it, I wasn't just free writing nonsense onto
the page. I don't think. I don't think it's full
of nonsense now, but it's absolutely critical at the beginning
(47:35):
to not really mind and to see that that sort
of little taskmaster inside you that is barking that this
isn't good enough and that you need to do better.
Like I'm sufficiently familiar with sort of internal family systems,
therapy and stuff to know that he does want the
best for you. He's not evil, but he really needs
to be sort of indulgently chuckled at rather than abade.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
I think the headline out of this is Berkman thinks's
latest book not much better than free writing exercises.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah, great positioning.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
Yeah you call them quantity goals. I refer to them
as effort goals. For me, I've been in the midst
of this with trying to write a book for myself. Now,
I've had the problem of having read a decade's worth
of books like this by many people who are extraordinarily
good authors. So I would consider you in that camp,
(48:29):
and that I know that what's coming out of me
isn't that good. And the phrase that I'll use is
yet And I have no idea can I write five
hundred words a day? Should I be writing with that?
I have no sense of any of it. So for me,
it's number of thirty minute sessions.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Yeah, it's just that.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
And if I get that done at the end of
the day, I do everything I can to just shut
off all the voices of doubt. And it's not good,
nothing good came out, and just be like I did it,
like I showed up and did my best for this
window of time. And that's just going to have to
be good enough for now.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
And the crazy part is I totally agree what is
represented by that attitude which is really engaging with reality,
which is, you know, putting aside perfectionistic fantasies in favor
of action that really matters. Like that will be in
the book just as a result of having approached it
in that way, right, right, separate from which words you
end up writing in the final draft, Like the book
(49:24):
will live and exude that in a way that I
don't even understand, right, I don't know how it works.
It seems a bit supernatural. But that sort of down
to earth approach I firmly believe will be reflected in
the sort of usefulness and ability to connect to people
that will be in the end product. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:39):
I imagine my editor is probably going to be like, Okay,
we've got the idea that writ in this book has
made you nervous, like we don't need it in like
every fifth sentence. Right.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
The other reason not to submit a perfect book is
you've got to give your editor something to do. Otherwise,
where's the meaning in your editor's life? Right, You've got
to give them something to get their teeth into and
send back and say do this differently.
Speaker 3 (49:59):
All right, let's end with a phrase that I really liked.
I'm just going to read a couple of sentences and
let you talk more about it. Striving towards sanity is
never going to work. You have to operate from sanity instead.
What does that mean.
Speaker 1 (50:16):
It means that whatever counts for you as the spirit
of the kind of life you want to live, and
when I think about myself, it's calm and energized, focused,
attentive and available for other people and sort of getting
important things actually done. All of that call that sanity
(50:39):
by my standards here in some sense, you have to
live from that identity right now and sort of manifest
that in the world, rather than viewing it as something
that you're working towards but that you can't have yet,
because if you define it in that way, that will
(51:01):
become a self fulfilling prophecy and you will never get
it because you're defining it as something that has to
be in the future. So that sounds very, very vague
and abstract. I think to make it a bit more concrete,
if you feel that at this point in your life,
as I do, a certain amount of more like rest
is probably appropriate than you've been granting yourself up to
(51:22):
this stage. Striving towards sanity would be saying, Okay, I
need to rest. I'm gonna take a sabbatical in a
year's time, and until then, I'm gonna you wouldn't necessarily
say it consciously to yourself, but right until then, I'm
going to work really really hard so that I've got
everything running and you know, the business is self sustaining
and everything's working. Out of your intuition that you need rest,
you start doing the exact opposite of resting, and reinforcing
(51:45):
all those parts of your psyche that think that what
you have to do in life is strive harder and
harder and harder. Starting from sanity, would be allowing yourself today,
maybe only for twenty minutes, maybe it doesn't feel very
great at first, but allowing yourself to take that a
little bit of rest, a little bit of enjoyment and
savoring of the world right here now. And there's lots
(52:07):
of other examples that don't necessarily apply to rest per se,
but it's that idea of finding some way to embody
the life you want to have now instead of working
towards some kind of amazing, full spectrum, perfect manifestation of
it that only comes later.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
Well, I think that is a great place for us
to wrap up. You and I are going to continue
in the Post Sho Conversation. We're going to talk about
distraction and interruption, what it means to be a good
person in this world, and answering the question of do
you really have to do that thing that you're convinced
you have to do. Listeners If you'd like access to
(52:48):
the Post SHO Conversation AD free episodes special episode I
do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem. And
you want to be part of supporting something that's important
to you, go to one u feed dot slash join
and we'd love to have you as part of our community. Oliver,
such a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
Thank you again, Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (53:24):
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
consider making a monthly donation to support the One you
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It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now.
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We wouldn't be able to do what we do without
(53:45):
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Host
Eric Zimmer
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