Four Thousand Weeks

‘When you can’t do it all, you feel ashamed and give up,’ notes the author Jon Acuff, but when you ‘decide in advance what things you’re going to bomb … you remove the sting of shame’.

to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.

pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and ‘your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is’ – and any period of life would be remembered as having lasted twice as long.

Not knowing what’s coming next – which is the situation you’re always in, with regard to the future – presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.

Shinzen Young teaches ‘Do Nothing’ meditation, for which the instructions are to simply set a timer, probably only for five or ten minutes at first; sit down in a chair; and then stop trying to do anything. Every time you notice you’re doing something – including thinking, or focusing on your breathing, or anything else – stop doing it.