What We're Reading Now

Laughing Amid the Impossible

28 January 2025

Janie read Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman and was excited to reframe her thinking about getting things done.   

Tags: balance, janie read, mindfulness

Have you ever told yourself, “Once I finish X, things will slow down? Or, once I get through Y, then I will stop feeling so overwhelmed and can relax a bit?” These are very common refrains for me. I often tell myself that I need to push hard to finish X, Y, and Z, and once those are done, things will calm down. The reality is that there are always other things that need doing and if I try to wait for a quiet or slow period, I’ll likely be waiting forever.

During a recent weekly huddle, Rachel recommended Oliver Burkeman’s book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. She suggested I wait to read the book until I could follow Burkeman’s recommendation of reading one chapter each day for four weeks. I’m so grateful to Rachel for this recommendation. In some chapters I felt like Burkeman was speaking directly to me.

The chapters are all very short (none took more than 15 minutes for me to read) but each one made me think. Other than a few exceptions, I read my chapters in the morning, and I found this helped me to have a more positive outlook on the day, even on days when everything else seemed to go wrong. The biggest takeaway for me was the idea of not waiting for X to happen before I let myself take a breath and relax. I realize one breath won’t do it, so I’m going to try closing my door and breathing for five minutes when I’m feeling really overwhelmed.

A concept that really resonated with me was the idea of developing a taste for problems. Burkeman shared an example of this from author and podcast host, Sam Harris. Harris remembered being at lunch with a friend and complaining about various problems he was dealing with at work. His friend interrupted mid-complaint to say, “Were you really expecting to have no more problems at some point in your life?” This made Harris realize he had been “…Assuming that I should be able to get rid of all my problems…Even though this sounds ridiculous, that was implicit to my thinking…to the way I was reacting to each problem.” Burkeman stressed that we stop thinking about our problems this way. Instead of thinking of problem-solving as getting in the way of doing your job, consider that solving problems is the job. Without problems, a piece of software could do many of our jobs. Solving problems is how we each make unique contributions that make us better than A.I.

Burkeman had a revolutionary idea about a long to-do list. “You think the problem is that you have far too many things to do, and insufficient time in which to do them, so…your only hope is to manage your time with amazing efficiency, summon extraordinary reserves of energy, block out all distractions and somehow power through to the end. In fact, your situation is worse than you think – because the truth is that the incoming supply of things that feel as though they need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible…An important psychological shift occurs whenever you realize that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible…It’s equivalent to that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin.”  

This idea of the things I want to accomplish being impossible instead of just being difficult really resonated with me. Living with this “as soon as” mindset hasn’t helped me to accomplish more, and at times it’s led to an almost ever-present feeling of overwhelm and anxiety that isn’t healthy. Recognizing this has been powerful for me and has helped me do a better job of letting myself relax and enjoy the present instead of always being focused on what’s next. It has also helped me prioritize things differently.

I have been caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella. I thought this was such a powerful metaphor for the sensation I often feel when I’m juggling a lot and feeling overwhelmed. When I read this, I remembered being in the rain with no umbrella or raincoat in sight. This helped me recognize how much time and energy I’ve wasted waiting for things to slow down and how futile this is. Now, when I find myself feeling overwhelmed, I conjure that image of myself in the pouring rain, but instead of feeling defeated, lately I’ve found myself smiling. If you're looking for a book that encourages you to accept your limitations and live with greater self-compassion, I highly recommend picking up Meditations for Mortals.

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