Tag: Personal Development

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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The main aim of Meditations for Mortals is to acquaint readers with a broader perspective on what drives our mania for controlling our schedules and inboxes. We fear the present moment, the way that we are “confined to this temporal locality, unable even to stand on tiptoes and peer over the fence into the future, to check that everything’s all right there.” I’ve felt, more times than I care to admit, that despite my heartbeat and mortgage and two walking, talking children, I’m not yet inside my life. Someday it will start, I imagine, the part of life in which I’m really engaged, really moving forward, really jolted with the electricity of having a mind and body that can interact with this wild world. I’ll leave behind this practice life for the real one.

— Hillary Kelly, from her interview of Oliver Burkeman in her essay: “You Are Going to Die.” (The Guardian, October 4, 2024)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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I have always resisted anything that smells a bit self-helpy. Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty content with my pretty average, relatively low-stress life, where days seized and squandered pass in fairly equal number, attended by tides of frustration or mild satisfaction… Floundering is living, too, Burkeman explains. And if there is any key to success, it’s giving up altogether the quest for super-productivity and rejecting the nagging impulse to get on top of things. Instead, we’d all be happier and more productive if we did what we could – and no more – while embracing our imperfections. Now that’s the kind of pep talk I can get on board with. […]

Meditations for Mortals could be read as a slacker’s charter, or as rehab for burned-out high achievers. For me, it fell somewhere in between. I have been grappling with my own middle-aged productivity wobbles. It can be deeply frustrating to know how much more you could earn or achieve if you could only find another gear, or rediscover the one you seemed to zoom along in as a care-free youngster.

Burkeman’s insight – always clear-eyed and jargon-free – backs up, in a reassuring and constructive way, the other sense I have on more forgiving days (going easy on yourself is the theme of day 16): that it’s better for you and everyone around you to work with, rather than fight against, who you are now. After all, Burkeman says, quoting the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson (who gets a free pass as a tech guy because he’s both Canadian and self-aware): most highly successful people are “just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity”.

— Simon Usborne, from his review of “Meditations for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman. (The Guardian, September 12, 2024)

Live & Learn. Yes!

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I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings, and then try to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed person.

— David Brooks, The Essential Skills for Being Human (nytimes.com, October 19, 2023)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I am a generally sloppy and frustrated baker, but every time I try, I find myself repeating—as a sort of incantation—the vivid, compact, flawless opening lines from “i am not done yet,” by Lucille Clifton: “as possible as yeast / as imminent as bread.” It’s a poem about becoming, about the endless act of inching closer to who we are meant to be. It says, We are never finished. It says, Maybe today is the day you wait long enough for your dough to rise.

— Ellen Cushing, from “The Culture Survey: Ellen Cushing” in The Atlantic, August 20, 2023

“i am not done yet”

as possible as yeast
as imminent as bread
a collection of safe habits
a collection of cares
less certain than i seem
more certain than i was
a changed changer
i continue to continue
what i have been
most of my lives is
where i’m going

—  Lucille Clifton, published in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980

Pure poison.

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apple-watch

Mark Morford, Optimize your way to a miserable life!

…Do not misunderstand. Goals are great. Achievements can feel wonderful. Fitness trackers can motivate you to stay healthy and workout more. Lists, efficiency, hard work – all lovely and powerful and, done correctly and with an open heart, laughter and good bourbon, fine playthings indeed.

But when they rule your world? When you can’t feel anything, connect to fellow humans, love or cry or enjoy your goddamn drink for a second because you got too much to do, places to go, scores to settle, appointments to keep, apps to download? When they replace intention, touch, a deep and connected pause?

Pure poison. The Void simply cannot be filled from the outside. Which is not to say that new, all-steel Apple Watch isn’t sort of gorgeous. Why not play with it? Enjoy it? And then laugh at its adorable attempts to tell you about something about the meaning of walking?

Be sure to read Morford’s entire post here: Optimize your way to a miserable life!

Image: Apple Watch at Apple.com