1: The Art of Transforming Suffering

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Some say that suffering is only an illusion or that to live wisely we have to “transcend” both suffering and joy. I say the opposite. The way to suffer well and be happy is to stay in touch with what is actually going on; in doing so, you will gain liberating insights into the true nature of suffering and of joy.

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If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow beautiful lotuses. If you know how to make good use of suffering, you can produce happiness.

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The very first teaching the Buddha gave after his enlightenment was about suffering. It’s called the Four Noble Truths. The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths are: there is suffering; there is a course of action that generates suffering; suffering ceases (i.e., there is happiness); and there is a course of action leading to the cessation of suffering (the arising of happiness).

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The Buddha was saying that if we can recognize suffering, and if we embrace it and look deeply into its roots, then we’ll be able to let go of the habits that feed it and, at the same time, find a way to happiness. Suffering has its beneficial aspects. It can be an excellent teacher

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The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.

2: Saying Hello

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The Buddha said that nothing can survive without food. This is true, not just for the physical existence of living beings, but also for states of mind. Love needs to be nurtured and fed to survive; and our suffering also survives because we enable and feed it.

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If we try to use consumption to ignore or distract ourselves from our suffering, we end up making the suffering worse. We turn on the television. We talk or text or gossip on the phone. We get on the Internet. We find ourselves in front of the refrigerator over and over again. When we cut ourselves off from the pain in our mind, we’re also abandoning our bodies where suffering is being stored. When we feel loneliness and despair, we seek to cover them up and pretend they’re not there

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When suffering arises, the first thing to do is to stop, follow our breathing, and acknowledge it. Don’t try to deny uncomfortable emotions or push them down. Breathing in, I know suffering is there. Breathing out, I say hello to my suffering.

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A mother taking care of a crying baby naturally will take the child into her arms without suppressing, judging it, or ignoring the crying. Mindfulness is like that mother, recognizing and embracing suffering without judgment.

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You can ask someone to look with you—a teacher, a friend, a psychotherapist. Whether alone or together with your friends, you can explore what kind of roots it has, and what nutriments and habits of consumption have been feeding your sorrow. You can discover how, through looking deeply, you can transform this organic “garbage” into compost, which in turn may become many beautiful flowers of understanding, compassion, and joy.

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Even with the best intention—and even with a longstanding mindfulness practice, we all have the tendency to run into the future or go back into the past, to search for happiness elsewhere.

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Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I smile.

3: Looking Deeply

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When we are in crisis or pain, we need to first take care of the immediate need, which is that crisis. Once our mindful energy has soothed our suffering, we can begin to look more deeply into its nature and sources. Just as when we have a headache, acknowledging its existence and understanding its causes helps us find the appropriate remedy for it, so understanding eases our pain and helps us transform it into compassion.

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Some of our ill-being comes from hurt and pain in our own life; but some has been transmitted to us by our ancestors.

it is literally passed verbally to each generation

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Before my mother gave birth to me, she had a miscarriage. The child who didn’t arrive that time—was he my brother or was he me? We aren’t the same, but we aren’t totally different. My feet have been transmitted to me by my ancestors. When I walk, I walk with my own feet, but these feet are also theirs. I can see the hand of my mother in my hand. I can see the arms of my father in my arms. I am my parents continuation.

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Getting angry with your father, you’re getting angry with yourself. The suffering of the parent is the suffering of the child. Looking deeply is a chance to transform and heal this suffering and stop the cycle.

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While most people are intensely afraid of dying, there are also people who are weary of living. They get bored after fifty, seventy, or maybe only twenty or thirty years. They find life unbearable and are seeking nonbeing. Some of them think that suicide is a way to end the suffering and to pass from the realm of being into nonbeing. Both of these preconceptions cause suffering because they ignore the reality that life and death always go together. You can’t take one out of the other. Even after your so-called death, you will continue in some way.

in the pain and sufferrg you pass on you need to end the cycle

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Deep looking can dismantle these kinds of notions. There is no birth and death; everything dies and renews itself all the time. When you get that kind of insight, you no longer tire yourself out with anxiety and aversion.

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“Can I realize my deepest aspiration if I pursue this path?” “What is really preventing me from taking the path I most deeply desire?”

how do i know which path

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Instead, hold on to your true purpose and remind yourself, “Listening like this, my sole aim is to help the other person to suffer less. She may be full of wrong perceptions, but I won’t interrupt her. If I jump in with my perspective on things or correct her, it will become a debate, not a practice of deep listening. Another time, there may be a chance for me to offer her a little information so that she can correct her wrong perception. But not now.”

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You might say something such as, “It’s not my intention to make you suffer. I didn’t understand your suffering. I’m sorry. Please help me by telling me about your struggles and your difficulties. I need help in understanding you.”

4: Ease

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There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense.

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As long as you continue to compare, you suffer from the fear of coming up short; and, even worse, you keep yourself trapped in a constant, painful delusion of isolation and alienation.

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wholeheartedly.” Every life has its trials and tribulations. We can navigate them more skillfully when we don’t waste time and energy shooting ourselves with a second arrow—such as dwelling on how much greener the grass in our neighbor’s yard looks, compared to ours

5: Five Practices for Nurturing Happiness

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We can experience both joy and happiness, and Buddhist teachings do make a distinction between the two. In joy, there is still some element of excitement. Think of a person walking in the desert who has run out of drinking water. If suddenly that person sees that there is an oasis ahead—trees with beautiful shade and a lake of fresh water—he will feel joy. When he arrives at the lake and actually cups the water and drinks, this is happiness. You can experience both.

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The method here is simple. Breathing in, bring your mind home to your body. Establish yourself in the here and the now and recognize what is around you. Then joy and happiness arise easily, from your recognition of all the positive elements available right now.

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We can condition our bodies and minds to happiness with the five practices of letting go, inviting positive seeds, mindfulness, concentration, and insight.

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The first method of creating joy and happiness is to cast off, to leave behind. There is a kind of joy that comes from letting go. Many of us are bound to so many things. We believe these things are necessary for our survival, our security, and our happiness. But many of these things—or more precisely, our beliefs about their utter necessity—are really obstacles for our joy and happiness.

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Every one of us has cows to be released. Consider practicing to release your cows. Take a piece of paper and write down the names of your cows, the things you think of as crucial for your well-being. Perhaps this week you can start by releasing just one, perhaps two. Or perhaps each one takes a year or more. The more cows you release, the more joyful and happy you become.

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my palace was guarded by hundreds of soldiers. But I was still very afraid. I was afraid robbers would come and kill me or at least take away all my valuables. So day and night I lived in fear. But last night I realized that now I have nothing to lose. I was sitting out in the forest at the foot of a tree, and never in my life have I felt so safe

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We each have many kinds of “seeds” lying deep in our consciousness. Those we water are the ones that sprout, come up into our awareness, and manifest outwardly.

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Waking up this morning I smile. I have twenty-four hours to live. I vow to live them deeply and learn to look at the beings around me with the eyes of compassion.

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I suggest you take a piece of a paper and write down all the conditions for happiness available to you right now. One page may not be enough. Two pages may not be enough. Three or four pages may not be enough. When we recognize all these elements, it’s so easy to generate happiness.

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We may know, for example, that something (a craving, or a grudge) is an obstacle for our happiness, that it brings us anxiety and fear. We know this thing is not worth the sleep we’re losing over it. But still we go on spending our time and energy obsessing about it. We’re like a fish who has been caught once before and knows there’s a hook inside the bait; if the fish makes use of that insight, he won’t bite, because he knows he’ll get caught by the hook. Often, we just bite onto our craving or grudge, and let the hook take us

6: Happiness Is Not an Individual Matter

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Anything you can do to lessen suffering in your community and in the world is known in Buddhism as Right Action. When you go to the supermarket, you can make the choice whether to practice Right Action or not. There are items for sale that have been produced by children who have no chance to go to school. There are items that have been made with materials that can be harmful. We are part of the collective whole, and even these individual decisions about what to consume affect the collective consciousness.

One: The Sixteen Breathing Exercises

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There’s loneliness, fear, anger, and despair in us. Mostly we try to cover it up by consuming. There are those of us who go and look for something to eat. Others turn on the television. In fact, many people do both at the same time. And even if the TV program isn’t interesting at all, we don’t have the courage to turn it off, because if we turn it off, we have to go back to ourselves and encounter the pain inside.

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The thirteenth exercise is the concentration on impermanence. With the insight of impermanence, we see the interdependent and selfless nature of all that exists—that nothing has a separate, independent self.

everythibg isconnected

Two: The Six Mantras

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The Six Mantras are ways to express love and compassion. They can be very effective in transforming suffering and producing happiness in a relationship with a loved one, a friend, or a colleague. Children can practice them too. You may start by first practicing the Six Mantras with yourself, because you can only love and understand another when you have practiced love and understanding for yourself

Three: Being Present with Strong Emotions

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When a painful emotion comes up, stop whatever you’re doing and take care of it. Pay attention to what is happening. The practice is simple. Lie down, put your hand on your belly, and begin to breathe. Or you may sit on a cushion or on a chair. Stop thinking, and bring your mind down to the level of the navel

Five: Metta

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we begin with ourselves to understand our own true nature.

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What do you do to nourish yourself?

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“Solid” refers to stability. If you aren’t solid, you won’t be able to accomplish much. Each day you only need to take a few solid steps in the direction of your goal.

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Before going to sleep at night, take a few minutes to review the day. “Did I live in the direction of my ideals today?”

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“Indifference.” When we are indifferent, nothing is enjoyable, interesting, or worth striving for. We don’t experience love or understanding, and our life has no joy or meaning. We don’t even notice the beauties of nature or the laughter of children.

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Attachment obstructs the flow of life. And without mindfulness, attachment always becomes aversion.

Six: Deep Relaxation

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The body is an important object of meditation. It contains the cosmos, the Kingdom of God, the Pure Land of the Buddha, and our ancestors both spiritual and genetic.

Eight: Walking Meditation

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If you suffer from depression, your depression won’t be able to go away until you know how to stop. You’ve lived in such a way that depression has become possible. You’ve been running and not allowed yourself the time to rest, to relax, and to live your daily life deeply

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Walking in walking meditation is walking just to enjoy walking. You don’t have any desire to arrive anywhere.

riding meditation

Copyright

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Plum Village 33580 Dieulivol, France plumvillage.org

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La Maison de l’Inspir 93160 Noisy le Grand, France maisondelinspir.org

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Healing Spring Monastery 77510 Verdelot, France healingspringmonastery.org

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Stream Entering Monastery Beaufort, Victoria 3373, Australia nhapluu.org

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The Mindfulness Bell, a journal of the art of mindful living in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, is published three times a year by our community. To subscribe or to see the worldwide directory of Sanghas, visit www.mindfulnessbell.org

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The Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation supports Thich Nhat Hanh’s peace work and mindfulness teachings around the world. For more information on how you can help or on how to nourish your mindfulness practice, visit the foundation at tnhf.org

Generated at: 2025-05-06-15-55-07

Epigraph

It’s Easier to try

‘It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.’
– MARION WOODMAN

Introduction: The imperfect life

Just a bit more discipline

Sometimes, it felt like all I needed was a bit more discipline; at other times, I was sure the answer lay in a new system for managing my tasks and goals, which I’d track down just as soon as I got this article on smoothies out of the way.

Anxiety disorders harnessed for productivity

‘Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.’

Imposter syndrome

But it takes other forms as well. For some it manifests as imposter syndrome, the belief that there’s a basic level of expertise that pretty much everyone else has attained, but that you haven’t, and that you won’t be able to stop second-guessing yourself until you get there.

What’s in a good life?

At the same time, a good life clearly isn’t about giving up all hope of influencing reality. It’s about taking bold action, creating things, and making an impact – just without the background agenda of achieving full control. Resonance depends on reciprocity: you do things – you have to launch the business, organise the campaign, set off on the wilderness trek, send the email about the social event – and then see how the world responds

Retaining what you read

Relatedly, I recommend making no over-industrious efforts to retain what you read, or to put it into practice; instead, trust that if something strikes a chord, it’ll linger through the day by itself.

A good practice to implement here is to write down notes for what you’ve read later in the day. Naturally the bits that hit home are the ones you can remember and write down. On top of that you won’t retain the information precisely so by writing it down later you naturally rewrite it in your own words.

Week One: BEING FINITE

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‘If you find yourself lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house. “Well, I was lost, but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament!”’
— MITCH HEDBERG

Day One: It’s worse than you think: On the liberation of defeat

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Imposter syndrome? You might believe you need more experience or qualifications in order to feel confident among your peers; but the truth is that even the most experienced and qualified people feel as though they’re winging it, much of the time – and that if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’ll probably have to do it in a state of feeling unprepared.

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The late British Zen master Hōun Jiyu-Kennett, born Peggy Kennett, had a vivid way of capturing the sense of inner release that can come from grasping just how intractable our human limitations really are. Her teaching style, she liked to say, was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.

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Kennett’s insight was that it can often be kinder and more effective to make their burden heavier – to help them see how totally irredeemable their situation is, thereby giving them permission to stop struggling.

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And then? Then you get to relax. But you also get to accomplish more, and to enjoy yourself more in the process, because you’re no longer so busy denying the reality of your predicament, consciously or otherwise.

Day Two: Kayaks and superyachts: On actually doing things

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Almost nobody wants to hear the real answer to the question of how to spend more of your finite time doing things that matter to you, which involves no system. The answer is: you just do them. You pick something you genuinely care about, and then, for at least a few minutes – a quarter of an hour, say – you do some of it. Today. It really is that simple.

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(Don’t get distracted wondering what might be the best thing to do: that’s superyacht thinking, borne of the desire to feel certain you’re on the right path.) Because the irony, of course, is that just doing something once today, just steering your kayak over the next few inches of water, is the only way you’ll ever become the kind of person who does that sort of thing on a regular basis anyway.

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Otherwise – and believe me, I’ve been there – you’re merely the kind of person who spends your life drawing up plans for how you’re going to become a different kind of person later on.

Day Three: You need only face the consequences: On paying the price

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

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At some point, as you seek to spend more of your finite existence in the ways that feel most meaningful to you, the thought will inevitably occur to you that you can’t make a certain choice about your time, however much you’d like to, because the circumstances simply don’t allow it

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Unless you’re literally being physically coerced into doing something, the notion that you ‘have to do it’ in truth means that you’ve chosen not to pay the price of refusing; just as the notion that you absolutely can’t do something generally means you’re unwilling to pay the price of doing it. You could quit your job with no backup plan. You could book a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro, or rob a bank, or tell your social media followers your honest views

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The conservative American economist Thomas Sowell summed things up with a bleakness I appreciate, insisting that there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

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The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.

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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.

Day Four: Against productivity debt: On the power of a ‘done list’

See what you’ve done

‘One never notices what has been done; one can see only what remains to be done.’ – MARIE CURIE

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Many people these days report the feeling that they begin each morning in a kind of ‘productivity debt’, which they must struggle to pay off over the course of the day, in hopes of returning to a zero balance by the time evening comes. If they fail – or worse, don’t even try – it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the planet.

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which means you’ll never get to rest, because how can you ever be sure there’s not a little more potential left to realise?

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There is a religious route out of productivity debt, if you believe in a god who bestows grace – who loves you and delights in you, in other words, regardless of how hard you strive to justify your existence by means of your productivity, goodness, or anything else. But agnostics and atheists get to take a different path to a similar destination: if there isn’t a god, then there’s no authority with the power to demand that you earn your right to exist. You just do exist, and that has to be sufficient.

A Lesson for insecure overachievers

This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.

Day Five: Too much information: On the art of reading and not reading

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By 1999, researchers estimated, the quantity of data generated worldwide came to at least 1.5 billion gigabytes. The 2024 estimate is 147 trillion gigabytes. Much of it isn’t in the form of published content, of course, but plenty is – and by comparison, according to one amateur back-of-the-envelope calculation, the entire Library of Alexandria contained around 12 gigabytes

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But the result, as I assume you’d agree if you’ve been active online these last few decades, hasn’t been greater sanity or calm. Since the incoming supply of genuinely interesting stuff is effectively limitless, improving the efficiency with which you discover it just means you’re bombarded with books, articles, podcasts and videos that seem like they might contain a nugget of wisdom critical for your happiness or professional success.

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The challenge, in the words of the technology critic Nicholas Carr, is figuring out how to deal, day in day out, with ‘haystack-sized piles of needles

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‘You will never be efficient enough to [hear] it all before you’re gone.’ Moving more quickly through an infinite incoming supply of something never gets you to the end of it. Because you’re processing more of it, faster, and without ever achieving the satisfaction of reducing it, you’re just left feeling more scattered and stressed.

stress also of nnot having digested it well

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The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by

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‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.'

trust reading alone

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The closely related final rule is to remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else.

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obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now

Day Six: You can’t care about everything: On staying sane when the world’s a mess

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Living inside the news feels like doing your duty and being a good citizen. But you can stay informed on ten minutes a day; scrolling any more than that risks becoming disempowering and paralysing, and certainly eats up time you could have spent making a difference.

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Imagine if it was normal for each person to focus ten times as deeply on one or two issues at a time, rather than taking on the emotional burden of dozens … [and] feeling helpless about ‘the state of the world’.

helpless because of so much wrong. everything is fucked

Day Seven: Let the future be the future: On crossing bridges when you come to them

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the days are more fun than the years which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest one day at a time, and never mind the rest

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The main way we try to resist this horrifying state of affairs is by worrying. What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross it

and analysing risk?

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As the celebrated Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius reassures readers of his Meditations: ‘Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.'

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Now and then, to be sure, the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the future. But you can do that, then let go of it, and move on; you needn’t try to live mentally ten steps ahead of yourself, straining to feel sure about what’s coming later

Day Eight: Decision-hunting: On choosing a path through the woods

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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.

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(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.’)

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If the speaker in ‘The Road Not Taken’ hadn’t consciously made some choice, he’d have made a different, unconscious one instead – to remain standing at that fork in the path, frozen in ambivalence, waiting for something to happen.

Day Nine: Finish things: On the magic of completion

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Perfectionists love to begin new endeavours, because the moment of starting belongs to the world of limitlessness: for as long as you haven’t done any work on a project, it’s still possible to believe that the end result might match the ideal in your mind.

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Similarly, at the start of any major undertaking, we see it in outline, smooth if a little blurry; it’s only as we dig in that we begin to encounter the flaws, the compromises, and the grunt-work involved. At which point we make the error of assuming that a new endeavour might be free of such imperfections.

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People think finishing things ‘would drain even more of their energy and they get tired just thinking about it’, Steve Chandler writes. They don’t see ‘that leaving things unfinished is what’s causing the low levels of energy’. (He suggests spending one day robotically completing as much unfinished business as you can: ‘Notice at the end of that day how much energy you’ve got. You’ll be amazed.’)

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The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is simply to redefine what counts as finished.

Day Ten: Look for the life task: On what reality wants

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Just recently, though, he’d had the creeping sense that by staying home he was somehow avoiding life. ‘I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from myself,’ he writes. Then he heard the friend ask his father: ‘And how is your son?’ ‘Ah, that’s a sad business,’ my father said. ‘The doctors no longer know what is wrong with him. They think it may be epilepsy. It would be dreadful if he were incurable. I have lost what little I had, and what will become of the boy if he cannot earn his own living?’ Jung recalls being ‘thunderstruck’ on hearing these words, and knowing immediately what he had to do. ‘This was the collision with reality. “Why, then, I must get to work!” I thought suddenly. From that moment on, I became a serious child. I crept away, went to my father’s study, took out my Latin grammar, and began to cram with intense concentration.’ The fainting fits returned but he ploughed on anyway, and eventually they ceased. As the Jungian analyst Deborah Stewart explains, Jung had recognised that resuming his studies was the ‘essential life task’ that faced him. His character was being tested – and he understood that if he was going to move forward into his life, instead of avoiding it, it was time to get down to work.

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How can you identify your current life task? That must always be a matter of intuition. But there are two signposts that may help. The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty’, as Jung puts it – and specifically with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long-established preference for comfort and security.

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The second signpost is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. If you only have fifty pounds in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of pounds’ worth of movie-making equipment (although it might involve doing something to raise the cash). If you’re the single parent of three small children, it won’t involve working eighteen-hour days for a tech start-up; and by the same token, if you’re unable to have children, it won’t involve becoming a biological parent.

Page 128 @ 21 May 2025 11:15:51 AM

That can’t be the case with a life task, which emerges, by definition, from whatever your life circumstances are.

Page 128 @ 21 May 2025 11:16:11 AM

It’s what’s being asked of you, with your particular skills, resources and personality traits, in the place where you actually find yourself.

Page 130 @ 21 May 2025 11:17:23 AM

On some level, I think we always already know when we’re hiding out in some domain of life, flinching from a challenge reality has placed before us. The purpose of a question like ‘What’s the life task here?’ is just to haul that knowledge up into the daylight of consciousness, where we can finally do something about

Day Eleven: Just go to the shed: On befriending what you fear

Page 131 @ 22 May 2025 09:11:33 AM

‘We cannot change anything unless we accept it.’ – C. G. JUNG

Page 132 @ 22 May 2025 09:12:05 AM

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.

Page 132 @ 22 May 2025 09:12:56 AM

If you really do have an alarmingly low bank balance, or the pain really is something serious, confronting the situation is the only way you can begin to do something about it; and there’s no better strategy than avoiding your inbox to ensure that someone will, eventually, lose patience with your failure to reply.

Page 134 @ 22 May 2025 09:13:54 AM

I learned this way of thinking about avoidance from Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk who explains it in a lovely book entitled Time Surfing.

Page 135 @ 22 May 2025 09:15:20 AM

The advice here is: go into the shed. Don’t do anything yet, just look around. Observe and take stock. Make the space your own. And […] the first solutions will present themselves. A number of items will change hands and be donated to others. Other things will wait until that Saturday afternoon when you say to yourself, ‘And now it’s time to clean out the shed.’ You don’t dread it any more, but are actually looking forward to it.

Page 138 @ 22 May 2025 09:17:24 AM

I talked about it with J, the man I live with, and he suggested three hours. Three hours! The very thought gave me an anxiety attack. How about two hours? Two hours! The very thought … One hour? More reasonable, but still not possible. Half an hour? Getting closer but still too much. Fifteen minutes? Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. Now there was a figure I could imagine. A nice solid amount of time, an amount of time I knew I could live through every day.

Page 139 @ 22 May 2025 09:18:01 AM

Befriending your rats is a gentle strategy, but there’s nothing submissive about it. It’s a pragmatic way to maximise your room for manoeuvre, and your capacity to make progress on the work you care about, by becoming ever more willing to acknowledge that things are as they are, whether you like it or not.

Day Twelve: Rules that serve life: On doing things dailyish

Page 144 @ 23 May 2025 01:01:10 PM

Deep down, you know that doing something twice per week doesn’t qualify as dailyish, while five times per week does, and in busy periods, three or four times per week might get to count. So you’re still putting some pressure on yourself. But, crucially, what you’re not doing is expecting the rule to somehow force the action.

no more than two days off

Page 144 @ 23 May 2025 01:01:55 PM

And that’s the key distinction here, I think: the unstated appeal of a lot of productivity advice, very much including the Seinfeld Strategy, lies in the bewitching idea that there might be a rule, or a set of rules, that would force accomplishment to occur, rendering it inevitable and automatic.

Page 148 @ 23 May 2025 10:09:17 PM

He owes it to talent, and maybe a modicum of luck, and then to the willingness to keep showing up and developing that talent, more days than not, in the unpredictable context of his real life. Obviously, the goal was never a chain of red Xs. It was making people laugh.

Day Thirteen: Three hours: On finding focus in the chaos

Page 150 @ 24 May 2025 07:50:50 AM

If rules should serve life, rather than the other way around, it follows that you shouldn’t expect there to be many one-size-fits-all rules for making the most of your time

Page 150 @ 24 May 2025 07:51:22 AM

If you’re a ‘knowledge worker’ – that is, if you spend your days doing things with computers and words and ideas, as opposed to, say, building houses out of bricks – then you’ll make the most progress, and cover the most ground, if you limit yourself to about three or four hours of intense mental focus each day.

Page 152 @ 24 May 2025 07:53:19 AM

Several of these examples come from Alex Pang’s book Rest, where he mentions countless others, and assembles research that helps explain why: because intense focus uses up energy; because it’s more effective to focus intensely during only your peak hours, rather than half-heartedly all day; and because creativity appears to depend partly on processes taking place in your brain while you’re not focusing.

Page 153 @ 24 May 2025 07:54:22 AM

The first is to try – to whatever degree your situation permits – to ringfence a three- or four-hour period each day, free from appointments or interruptions. The equally important second part is not to worry about imposing much order on the rest of the day: to accept that your other hours will probably be characterised by the usual fragmentary chaos of life

Day Fourteen: Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase

Page 158 @ 25 May 2025 05:57:07 PM

‘Beyond the mountains, more mountains.’ – HAITIAN PROVERB

Week Three: LETTING GO

Page 165 @ 26 May 2025 09:43:53 AM

‘Life completely unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity.’ – KŌSHŌ UCHIYAMA

Day Fifteen: What if this were easy?: On the false allure of effort

Page 168 @ 26 May 2025 09:45:38 AM

And in one sense, for finite humans, life certainly is a tough challenge: you’ve got severely limited time, and limited control, necessitating hard choices and a tolerance for imperfection and uncertainty. But it’s equally true that often the real challenge, in building an accomplished and absorbing life, is learning to let go. Not making things happen, through willpower or effort, but cultivating the willingness to stand out of the way and let them happen instead

Page 174 @ 26 May 2025 09:50:22 AM

I realise that sounds like the worst kind of denial of human limitation, as if you could get your way merely by commanding the universe to fall in line with your desires. In fact, though, it can be surprisingly effective – because it functions not as a mystical command to the universe but as a reminder to yourself not to fall into the old habit of adding complications or feelings of unpleasant exertion where neither need exist

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

Page 188 @ 28 May 2025 09:18:17 AM

You just need to find where you already feel warmth or tenderness, then go from there. And your penchant for Mexican food is as good a place to start as any other.

Page 190 @ 28 May 2025 09:20:34 AM

This is why I can wholeheartedly recommend a personal policy I learned from the (vastly less problematic) meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, and that I seek to follow myself, which is to act on a generous impulse the moment it arises.

Page 191 @ 28 May 2025 09:21:09 AM

The simplest way to do that is to move fast. ‘Each time the thought to give arises, act on it. Then notice what happens,’ Goldstein counsels, adding that ‘in my experience, generosity never leads to remorse’.

Page 192 @ 28 May 2025 09:21:43 AM

All else aside, the fact that you felt the desire in the first place suggests that you already possessed the values you were chastising yourself for lacking; only someone with morals can beat themselves up for lacking morals.

Day Eighteen: Allow other people their problems: On minding your own business

Page 193 @ 29 May 2025 09:52:53 AM

‘People-pleasing is a form of assholery … because you’re not pleasing anybody – you’re just making them resentful because you’re being disingenuous, and you’re also not giving them the dignity of their own experience [by assuming] they can’t handle the truth.’ – WHITNEY CUMMINGS

Page 194 @ 29 May 2025 09:53:10 AM

‘Great news! I found the cure for my anxiety!!’ the author Sarah Gailey once announced on social media. ‘All I need is for everyone I know to tell me definitively that they aren’t mad at me, once every fifteen seconds, forever.'

Page 194 @ 29 May 2025 09:53:35 AM

Once I’d accepted a deadline or signed a contract, there was another person in the world who might be growing impatient that I hadn’t finished yet, or who might be disappointed with what I produced – and the thought of their harbouring any negativity towards me felt hugely oppressive

Page 195 @ 29 May 2025 09:54:11 AM

What I eventually figured out – not that it ever seems to get particularly easy – is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems

Page 195 @ 29 May 2025 09:54:38 AM

Before we go any further, it bears emphasising that the people you’re worried might be angry with you or bored by you or disappointed in you almost never are.

Page 195 @ 29 May 2025 09:55:08 AM

According to stereotype, people-pleasers are self-effacing types, and yet there’s something strikingly grandiose about the notion that your boss, client or coworker has nothing better to do than pace up and down all day thinking bad thoughts about you – or that your presence at a social gathering has the power to ruin it for anyone else.

Page 197 @ 29 May 2025 09:56:31 AM

Taken at face value, the news that somebody is upset because you’re not behaving as they wanted you to behave is just that: a report on the state of their emotional weather. You might or might not choose to act on such a report, but that’s an entirely separate matter. Every decision is a question of trade-offs, as we saw on Day Three, and other people’s emotions are one more thing to be weighed in the balance

Day Nineteen: A good time or a good story: On the upsides of unpredictability

Page 202 @ 30 May 2025 09:16:53 PM

‘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

Page 203 @ 30 May 2025 09:17:37 PM

Almost everything that happens, according to an adage of uncertain origin, is either a good time or a good story. Either things go right, or they go wrong; and surprisingly often when they do go wrong – although of course not invariably – life ends up unaccountably better as a result

Day Twenty: Set a quantity goal: On firing your inner quality controller

Page 214 @ 31 May 2025 10:30:25 PM

We operate on the assumption that any idea we come up with probably won’t be good enough, so we subject it to the scrutiny of a beady-eyed inner gatekeeper, and only reluctantly, if it first meets the gatekeeper’s stringent standards, allow it out on to the screen, or the page, or into the brainstorming meeting.

Day Twenty-three: How to start from sanity: On paying yourself first

Page 247 @ 03 June 2025 08:21:33 AM

‘Operating from sanity’, on the other hand, means embodying a certain kind of orientation towards life first, one that treats the present moment as a place where peace of mind might, in theory, be attainable – and then going about your life from that orientation, rather than treating the activities of your life as things you’re doing in order to one day reach it.

Page 248 @ 03 June 2025 08:21:51 AM

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

Page 248 @ 03 June 2025 08:22:44 AM

The signature behaviour of the operator-from-sanity, by contrast, is what the creativity coach Jessica Abel calls ‘paying yourself first with time’: spending a little time on what matters to you most immediately, instead of waiting, because you understand that even thirty minutes spent Actually Doing the Thing today are more valuable than hundreds of purely hypothetical hours in the future.

Page 250 @ 03 June 2025 08:23:30 AM

Deal with a backlog by isolating it.

Page 251 @ 03 June 2025 08:24:18 AM

Free up time by renegotiating existing commitments, not just planning to make fewer.

Page 251 @ 03 June 2025 08:24:50 AM

Treat your to-do list as a menu

Day Twenty-four: Scruffy hospitality: On finding connection in the flaws

Page 254 @ 04 June 2025 08:29:52 PM

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

Day Twenty-five: You can’t hoard life: On letting the moments pass

Page 263 @ 05 June 2025 09:14:37 AM

‘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.'

Page 264 @ 05 June 2025 09:15:13 AM

mornings, carrying a flask of hot coffee, I get to stroll along a lane with spectacular views across a valley to the heather-topped ridge beyond. In winter, the pink light of sunrise pours itself slowly over fields buried in snow; regularly, in spring and summer, a barn owl swoops low across my path. It’s a magical landscape, and one that I’ve loved since childhood

Page 265 @ 05 June 2025 09:15:56 AM

better described as a clenching or a gripping, an attempt to grasp hold of what’s happening so as to mine it for as much value as possible

Page 265 @ 05 June 2025 09:16:30 AM

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 wanted them to.

Page 267 @ 05 June 2025 09:19:03 AM

Our attempt to grip on to fleeting experiences expresses the desire to store them up, use them for future purposes, freeze time in its tracks, or in some other way to resist the truth that this is it

the uncomfortable truth

Page 268 @ 05 June 2025 09:20:32 AM

Contrast these efforts to grab hold of experience with the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony, in which fleetingness is understood not as a threat to what’s unfolding, but as the source of its value.

Page 269 @ 05 June 2025 09:20:57 AM

Japanese statesman Ii Naosuke explains: Great attention should be given to a tea gathering, which we can speak of as ‘one time, one meeting’ (ichi-go, ichi-e). Even though the host and guests may see each other often socially, one day’s gathering can never be repeated exactly. Viewed this way, the meeting is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime occasion

Page 270 @ 05 June 2025 09:22:28 AM

This is not to say that life becomes a matter of unbroken good cheer; after all, it’s sad that a beautiful moment arises then vanishes. But it’s the flavour of sadness conveyed by the Japanese phrase 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.

Day Twenty-six: Inconceivable: On the solace of doubt

Page 279 @ 06 June 2025 04:28:13 PM

Where could you take useful action on an important project, today, despite not really knowing how to proceed on it beyond that initial step? What issue in your life could you patch up – what relationship could you mend, what behaviour could you alter – without fully grasping what went wrong in the first place?

Day Twenty-eight: What matters: On finding your way

Page 296 @ 08 June 2025 10:44:48 PM

(As we saw on Day Four, we often use productivity to try to earn back the right to belong.)

Page 297 @ 08 June 2025 10:45:36 PM

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.

Epilogue: Imperfectly onward

Page 302 @ 08 June 2025 10:49:43 PM

What if I’ll always have anxious reactions – the clench in the stomach, the sharp intake of breath – to minor events that don’t warrant them? My first response is to feel crestfallen; but soon thereafter comes relief. I get to give up on that futile struggle, which means I needn’t wait for it to be won before diving into reality.

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