After finishing this book in October of 2024, I wrote,

 

I'm going to fall back on two of my favorite quotes to give you a flavor of this book:

​

Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically.

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness:

it is always urgent, ‘here and now’ without any possible postponement.

Life is fired at us point blank. 

―Jose Ortega y Gasset 

​

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin: real life.

But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first,

some unfinished business, time still to be served, or a debt to be paid.

Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. 

—Alfred D. Souza

​

 

My clippings below collapse a 186-page book into 8 pages, measured by using 12-point type in Microsoft Word. 

​

See all my book recommendations.  

​

Here are the selections I made:

​​

Introduction. The imperfect life

​

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out. It’s about how marvelously productive you become when you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive; and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely need to do any of them at all). It’s about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never be fully resolved.

​

When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count. When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them. And when you stop making your sanity or self-worth dependent on first reaching a state of control that humans don’t get to experience, you’re able to start feeling sane and enjoying life now, which is the only time it ever is.

​

Week One. Being Finite

 

DAY ONE It’s worse than you think On the liberation of defeat

 

‘What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.’–EUGENE GENDLIN

 

But if doing everything that’s demanded of you, or that you’re demanding of yourself, is genuinely impossible, then, well, it’s impossible, and facing the truth can only help.

 

Because our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn’t yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophobia and lack of escape routes that entails. (‘ Our suffering,’ as Mel Weitsman, another Zen teacher, puts it, ‘is believing there’s a way out.’)

 

The main point–though it took me years to realize it–is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine.

 

‘You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.’–SHELDON B. KOPP

 

The conservative American economist Thomas Sowell summed things up with a bleakness I appreciate, insisting that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.

 

Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs–because there will always be trade-offs–and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.

 

If this describes you, there’s a good chance that like me you belong to the gloomy bunch psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers,’ which is a diplomatic way of saying that our accomplishments, impressive as they may sometimes be, are driven ultimately by feelings of inadequacy. For example, maybe you believe that you’ll have earned your right to exist only when you attain a certain level of social standing, or income, or academic qualifications. Or perhaps you’ve tethered your self-esteem to the most crazy-making standard of all, ‘realizing your potential’–which means you’ll never get to rest, because how can you ever be sure there’s not a little more potential left to realize?

 

My favorite way of combating the feeling of productivity debt in everyday life is to keep a ‘done list,’ which you use to create a record not of the tasks you plan to carry out, but of the ones you’ve completed so far today–which makes it the rare kind of list that’s actually supposed to get longer as the day goes on.

 

(Plus, if you’re really stuck in a rut, you can always define more loosely what gets to count as a completed task. Nobody else ever needs to know you added ‘made coffee’ or ‘took a shower’ to your done list.)

 

‘The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.’–WILLIAM JAMES

 

Let the future be the future On crossing bridges when you come to them ‘What is anxiety? It is the next day. With whom, then, does the pagan contend in anxiety? With himself, with a delusion, because the next day is a powerless nothing if you yourself do not give it your strength.’–SØREN KIERKEGAARD

 

Thus, as Hannah Arendt writes, ‘constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.’

​

Week Two. Taking Action

 

The whole point of facing the truth about finitude is that it gets easier to spend more of your time on worthwhile and life-enriching activities once you’re no longer trying to do all of them, or do them perfectly, or do them with the secret agenda of achieving a feeling of security or control.

 

Far more frequently, though, the life-enhancing route is to think of decisions not as things that come along, but as things to go hunting for. In other words: to operate on the assumption that somewhere, in the confusing morass of your work or your life, lurks at least one decision you could make, right now, in order to get unstuck and get moving.

 

There are two rules of decision-hunting worth bearing in mind here. The first is that a decision doesn’t get to count as a decision until you’ve done something about it in reality, so as to put some of your discarded alternatives beyond reach.

 

The other rule, however, balancing the first, is that as long as a decision meets that litmus test, it can be as tiny a decision as you like. Grand gestures aren’t required. There’s no need to leap directly from thinking about a career change to marching into your manager’s office to quit. Baby steps are fine; they just have to be real ones. (What the novelist E. L. Doctorow said about novel-writing applies to everything else, too: it’s ‘like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’)

 

To define your next deliverable, clarify some outcome you could attain in a single sitting–in the next few minutes, say, or over an hour or two at most. Then work until you reach it. If you need to send a difficult email, write the email and send it, rather than beginning it then letting it fester in your drafts. For bigger projects, break off a piece: finish the research for the first section of the report; finalize the paint colors for the living room; select a workout plan and schedule your first session at the gym. Do it and be done with it. Put it on your done list, if you like. Then move on.

 

Treating what you do with your time as a sequence of tiny completions means falling into line with how things really are. ‘Work is done, then forgotten,’ says the Tao Te Ching. ‘Therefore it lasts forever.’ You’re no longer fighting the current, but letting it carry you forward. Life is less effort that way.

 

It can be alarming to realize just how much of life gets shaped by what we’re actively trying to avoid. We talk about ‘not getting around to things’ as if it were merely a failure of organization, or of will. But often the truth is that we invest plenty of energy in making sure we never get around to them. It’s an old story: some task, or some entire domain of life, makes you anxious whenever you think about it, so you just don’t go there.

 

‘Dailyish’ is one that does. In not insisting on your doing something absolutely every day, it shifts the focus away from the ultimately meaningless question of whether or not you have an unbroken chain of red Xs, and back to the life it’s supposed to be serving–to the thing you’re seeking to bring into existence, whether that’s a piece of writing, a work of art, a happy family, a healthier body, or anything else.

 

And I am free to aspire not to a life without problems, but to a life of ever more interesting and absorbing ones.

​

Week Three. Letting Go

 

‘Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.’–ATTRIBUTED TO SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

 

‘My mom used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing,’ reads one splendid anonymous comment on a Washington Post article by the advice columnist Carolyn Hax. ‘I’m 48 now, have a PhD and a thriving and influential career, and I still think there is very very little that’s worthy of applying my whole entire ass. I’m not interested in burning myself [out] by whole-assing stuff that will be fine if I half-or quarter-ass it. Being able to achieve maximum economy of ass is an important adult skill.’

 

So it takes guts: you have to ‘be willing to let it be easy,’ as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it.

 

The entrepreneur and podcaster Tim Ferriss phrases the question slightly differently: ‘What would this look like if this were easy?’

 

It’s quite sufficient a challenge to seek to follow what the philosopher Iddo Landau calls the ‘reverse golden rule’–that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else. Can you imagine berating a friend in the manner that many of us deem it acceptable to screech internally at ourselves, all day long? Adam Phillips is exactly right: were you to meet such a person at a party, they’d immediately strike you as obviously unbalanced. You might try to get them to leave, and possibly also seek help. It might occur to you that they must be damaged–that in Phillips’s words ‘something terrible’ must have happened to them–for them to think it appropriate to act that way.

 

This is why it takes courage to ask yourself the question that I suspect all those gurus promoting the ‘warrior mindset’ and ‘mental toughness’ are too frightened to ask themselves: How would you like to spend your time today?

 

Don’t stand in generosity’s way On the futility of ‘becoming a better person’

 

Allow other people their problems On minding your own business

 

Instead, the point is simply that it’s a fool’s errand–and a flagrant denial of your finite power over reality–to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK, too.

 

‘You know,’ a Guardian editor once told me, very early in my career, after she’d been waiting all day for me to tell her whether or not I could take on a certain assignment, because I feared I didn’t have the bandwidth, yet also couldn’t bear to disappoint her, ‘if you can’t do something, saying no right away usually makes it much easier for everyone.’ It was years before it struck me that this might have been one of the most generous things anyone had ever said to me. It helped me see that if trying so hard to manage other people’s emotions wasn’t even helping them, I had less to lose by abandoning the endeavor. And so I began to grapple with a truth that people-pleasers are prone to resist until it halfway kills them: that very often, the best way to benefit others is to focus on doing your thing.

 

‘It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don’t know what’s coming is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection.’–ANN PATCHETT

 

It’s possible I’ve given the impression, so far, that the lack of control you have over how reality unfolds is just one of those unfortunate truths to which you’d better resign yourself. But it’s more than that. In some profound way, it’s a good thing. Not being able to guarantee that your plans will come off; not knowing what the future holds; never quite feeling like you’ve got things figured out, or that you’re on top of things–all of these are mysteriously central to what makes life worth living.

 

Still, it’s central to an enjoyable and meaningful life that whenever we reach out to the world in this way, we don’t get to control how it responds. The value and depth of the experience relies on that unknowability. Maybe you’ll get what you wanted, or maybe you won’t–and sometimes, not getting what you wanted will leave life immeasurably better.

​

Week Four. Showing Up

 

In his book Anti-Time Management, Richie Norton boils this philosophy down to two steps. One: ‘Decide who you want to be.’ Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately.’

 

First, sequester all those emails in a separate folder, or the tasks on a separate to-do list. (And just like that, your inbox is empty!) Thereafter, your priority isn’t to blast through the backlog, but to stay up to date on new incoming emails or tasks, so as to prevent another backlog developing. Chip away at the old one a little per day–or, if you think you can get away with it, just forget about it entirely.

 

Operating from sanity, in this case, means biting the bullet and renegotiating some of the commitments that are already on your plate: backing out of projects, requesting deadline extensions, or canceling social plans, so as to reduce the real, current demands on your time, not just hypothetical demands on it later.

 

Obviously, not every task on every to-do list will be as appetizing as the restaurant analogy suggests. But it’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plow through, but as options you get to pick.

 

‘A perfectly kept house is the sign of a misspent life.’–MARY RANDOLPH CARTER

 

‘The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.’–G. W. F. HEGEL

 

She accepted that her life was now outside anything she had ever imagined, there was no reason for living, and, at the same time, there was no reason why she couldn’t survive or feel joy … She had to live merely for the sake of life, without justifications or achievements. She found that she was willing to do this. It also came to her that taking this path was generous to her daughter.

 

In other words, the more willing you are wholeheartedly to acknowledge the hard limitations of human finitude, the easier it gets to do what others might dismiss as impossible.

 

Once you stop struggling to get on top of everything, to stay in absolute control, or to make everything perfect, you’re rewarded with the time, energy and psychological freedom to accomplish the most of which anyone could be capable.

 

‘It was said of Rabbi Simcha Bunim that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha’olam–“For my sake the world was created.” On the other he wrote: V’anokhi afar v’aefer–“I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out each slip of paper as necessary, as a reminder to himself.’–TOBA SPITZER

 

We feel pressured to do something extraordinary with our lives, or to an extraordinary standard of merit, or in a way that’s applauded by an extraordinary number of people–even though it’s true by definition that only a few people can ever be extraordinary in any given domain. (If we could all stand out from the crowd, there’d be no crowd from which to stand out.) Why shouldn’t an anonymous career spent quietly helping a few people get to qualify as a meaningful way to spend one’s time? Why shouldn’t an absorbing conversation, an act of kindness, or an exhilarating hike get to count? Why adopt a definition that rules such things out?

 

Yet, as the Zen philosopher Alan Watts liked to point out, it makes just as much sense to say that we come out of the world: that in the same way a tree blossoms, the universe ‘peoples.’ We are expressions of it. Our very being is inseparable from our context, or as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we ‘inter-are’; my existence would be wholly impossible without countless people and things I standardly think of as separate from myself. Perhaps the ultimate expression of our finitude is the fact that we are irrevocably of the world, whether we like it or not. If so, then maybe our responsibility isn’t to get our arms around it, nor to justify ourselves before it, but to embody as completely as possible the momentary expression of it that we are.

 

You might easily never have been born, but fate granted you the opportunity to get stuck into the mess you see around you, whatever it is. You are here. This is it. You don’t much matter–yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. The river of time flows inexorably on; amazingly, confoundingly, marvelously, we get the brief chance to go kayaking in it.

​

Epilogue. Imperfectly onward

 

‘There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat’s black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.’

 

–JORGE LUIS BORGES

 

As an imperfectionist, you don’t have to pretend this situation is without its poignancy, its seasons of grief, its spells of loneliness, confusion or despair. But you no longer fight as hard as you once did to persuade yourself this isn’t the way things are, or that human existence ought to be otherwise. Instead, you choose to put down that impossible burden–and to keep on putting it down when you realize, as you frequently will, that you’ve inadvertently picked it up again. And so you move forward into life with greater vigor, a more peaceful mind, more openness to others, and, on your better days, the exhilaration that comes from savoring reality’s bracing air.

​

​