Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.
The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not.
You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own.
You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.
The alternative approach is to fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items.
You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.
Schemes and plans for making things better fuel our dissatisfaction with the only place where happiness can ever be found – the present.
The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralysed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations.
Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
To rest for the sake of rest – to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake – entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.
1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity.
Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough – that you are enough – because it defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life.
It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.
Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.
Think of it as “existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.
But the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.
I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems.4 With that thought an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.
It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.
To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.
Any finite life – even the best one you could possibly imagine – is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.