Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

mono no aware, a wistful pathos at the transience of things, the kind of poignant sadness that deepens an experience instead of detracting from it. The kind you feel once you’re no longer grasping at the moment, thereby undermining your experience of it, but stepping more fully into it. Feeling yourself a part of it. Being it.

live the kind of life you want to be living – which in my case means calm and focused, energetic and meaningfully productive, and connected to others,

nurture your relationships, pursue challenging goals, spend time in nature, and make room for fun.

It doesn’t mean something’s wrong, and it doesn’t mean you can’t take constructive action – or, alternatively, relax – until all the answers are in. It just means that we’re limited in our capacity to get a grip on our infinitely complex reality. It makes little sense to let that hold you back from living in it.

It’s not a given, at any moment, that we’ll even be able to understand what’s happening, or what a reasonable response to it

In those days, you couldn’t ever have known with confidence what caused a famine or an outbreak of disease, nor felt reassured that a total eclipse didn’t presage the end of the world.

Among spiritual traditions, Buddhism is uniquely insightful when it comes to this specific form of suffering – how we make ourselves more miserable than necessary, not just by railing against negative experiences we’re having, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold on to good things that are happening exactly as we

You might get all sorts of useful things done – but they’ll never bring peace of mind, because you’ll effectively be telling yourself on a daily basis that peace of mind is something distant and not available right here.

There is a] strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that, but whether it is [a relationship with] a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about … The one thing dreaded throughout by such