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Meditations for Mortals, with Oliver Burkeman • Episode #169

Step into a world of philosophical musings and practical wisdom with Oliver Burkeman. Meditations for Mortals is his latest book designed as a four-week mental retreat, promising to help readers lead a ‘saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life’. Oliver joins Kate to talk about everything from the inspiration he took from Marcus Aurelius to how to invite people over without feeling like you have to spend three hours tidying the house. He also reveals his tips on making life-changes that stick, and the books he turns to when he’s not reading for work.

Keen to test out the methodology, Kate is then joined by City high-flyer and busy mother-of-three Emily Bohill to discover how Meditations for Mortals works in practice. From managing work-life balance to facing literal rats in the PTA shed, we explore whether the lessons of Meditations are ones that will stay.

This episode is for everyone who is keen to turn knowledge into action and embrace life’s imperfections. No less important is the fact that Meditations for Mortals is perfect for sparking deep conversations, and there’s nothing we love more at The Book Club Review than that.

Reading list

4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Hollis

Hungry for more? Sign up for The Imperfectionist (Oliver’s free newsletter) at oliverburkeman.com

Timecodes for the time-poor

00:00 Introduction

01:32 An overview of the book, and the degree to which Oliver Burkeman put himself in there

03:55 The relationship between Meditations for Mortals and Four Thousand Weeks

06:24 Imperfectionism

10:45 Practical Applications and personal reflections

13:01 Field-testing the book’s methodology

29:37 Daily-ish and embracing imperfection

34:34 Scruffy hospitality and overcoming procrastination

45:34 Has it changed our lives? 

Listen via the media player below, or your preferred podcast player with this Podfollow link.

Transcript

 Kate: Hello and welcome to the Book Club Review, the podcast about book clubs and the books that get people talking.

I’m Kate, and if your life is sufficiently full and well balanced that you are not looking at Instagram. Firstly, congratulations, and secondly, you won’t know that I spent much of last month following Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals, a book conceived as a four week retreat of the mind, with the promise that it will leave you with the tools to lead a saner, freer, more enchantment filled life.

But does it work? Well Later on, we’ll hear from City Executive and busy mother of three, Emily Bohill, who read along with me, to find out. But first, taking inspiration from Day 2, the chapter on actually doing things, I got in touch with Oliver Burkeman and asked him to come on the show. And he, perhaps taking inspiration from Chapter 17, the one on acting on generous impulses,

Oliver, thank you so much for joining me. It feels very strange for me speaking to you in real life, having read the book twice and listened to you read it to me in the audio version. You did almost become like an auxiliary family member during the time I was reading the book. But of course, I don’t know you in real life.

I only know the version of you that’s in the book. So tell us about Meditations for Mortals and why it was important for you to put so much of yourself into it.

Oliver Burkeman: Well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me to talk about this. I can only really write any book in one way, as far as I can tell, which is what are the things that I’m trying to figure out for myself at that point in life? What’s the connecting theme that runs through them all? And then I guess also, how do I think this could be helpful to somebody else? So that it’s not just a total exercise in self absorption. I guess what I was really focusing in on in Meditations for Mortals was this sense of how easy it is for people, very much including me, to feel like they know that you know how you want to show up for life, the work you want to do, the things you want to give your time and attention to, have a really strong sense of that. And then just like not actually do it, week after week and month after month. So the personal aspects of this book are my own encounters with that, and struggles with that, and the perspective that I’ve found that enables me to at least to some extent actually do the things that really matter to me and actually be a little bit more like the person I’d like to be and all the rest of it.

So it’s all about crossing that gap from knowing to doing, I suppose.

Kate: And these aren’t meditations where you sit and you allow your mind to go blank and you concentrate on your breathing. This is a very different kind of meditation where they’re quite active, aren’t they?

Oliver Burkeman: Yes. So this word has caused some interesting conversations. At least a few people seem to imagine that this is a book about meditation, about sitting on a cushion and following your breath. Now the person in whose footsteps I’m arrogantly claiming to follow here is not the Buddha but Marcus Aurelius, whose book Meditations is a collection of insights and perspectives to think about, to reflect on, rather than anything to do with what we think of as mindfulness meditation.

I guess the idea behind choosing that word and that approach It’s just that I’m convinced that the most practical way to actually change and to start to see the world in a slightly different way and to exist in it in a slightly different way is to let some of these ideas sink under your skin and into your bones. Spend a bit of time marinading in them. I sometimes I feel like it should have been called marination for mortals. I don’t know. But as opposed to the standard self-help approach, which is like, here are six steps you need to follow and as long as you follow them, all the results will ensue, which in my experience, never happens.

Kate:  I didn’t rush to pick it up when it came out, even though I would consider myself a fan of your writing, but because I’d read your previous book, Four Thousand Weeks, which takes as its central theme the idea that if we’re lucky, most of us might reasonably be expected to live until we’re eighty, If you break that down into weeks, that’s 4, 000 weeks, which doesn’t sound like long, does it? And what are we doing with that time, right? That’s my broad sense of that book. And I thought after reading that, I sort of wasn’t quite sure what else I was going to learn. I felt like I’d done 4, 000 Weeks, you know? But then when I picked up Meditations in the bookshop and I read a bit, I was actually astonished at the degree to which it hit home with me.

And I thought perhaps 4, 000 Weeks and all the thinking I did when I read that had somehow primed me to be ready for this book. Do you think of the two books in relation to each other, does this feel like an evolution of what you were doing in 4, 000 Weeks?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I think so. I wanted to be very careful writing the new book, not to make it that you need to have read anything else I’ve ever written, but certainly it evolved out of that last book for me. And I suppose one way you could see that is 4, 000 Weeks is a whole, I hope, refreshing, not really new, but rediscovered, maybe, perspective on how to think about our finite time. And then maybe this book is how to do things differently in light of that. With 4, 000 Weeks, I really felt like I’d got at something I’d been wanting to work out about how one relates to finitude.

And then I’d realized in the years since, that both I and some people who’d really enjoyed 4, 000 Weeks had this other stumbling block of like, how do you actually show up in the way you want to? Doesn’t matter that you’ve read a book, even if you really liked it, even if you found it really powerful, that’s not gonna do the whole job.

So I really wanted to explore that topic of crossing into action.

Kate: I’m so glad you did, because I loved Four Thousand Weeks, but I felt like it didn’t leave me anywhere ultimately that useful at the end, much as I’d enjoyed reading it and reflecting on it. I just say that because I found this book and the way I felt after reading this book, I thought it left me in quite a different and much more helpful place.

There are so many things in it that I loved. This idea of daily ish, scruffy hosting, the idea that we’re not all cruising around in super yachts, that we’re actually just in these little kayaks and we don’t have that much control over where they go. All these things felt like gifts, but it’s got this central thread, hasn’t it? Which is this overarching idea of imperfectionism. Can you tell us more about this?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I mean this is really just my umbrella term for the kind of outlook and approach to life that’s takes it as a given that our time is finite, that there will always be too much to do, too many meaningful things to do compared to the time you have in which to do them, that we’re never going to fully understand what it is we’re doing here or other people, constant source of bewilderment, that we’re never gonna be able to Feel absolutely confident about the future all these ways in which we’re limited and of course the most obvious kind of anti perfectionism, right? That we’re never going to produce perfect work in the world either. What if you start from there instead of what I think we end up doing a lot of the time which is acting as if that isn’t the case. Doing things that look like personal development, or look like productivity techniques, but are really just ways of trying to convince ourselves that these baked-in limitations don’t apply. If you just take that as a given, what would you do next? And that’s really the spirit, I hope, that comes out of this book.

This idea, to quote another writer, Sasha Chapin, who I do quote in the book, this spirit of sort of playing in the ruins, right? It’s like, ‘Okay. All these ways in which I might have wished my life to be totally perfect, totally under control, totally competent. That was never on the cards, so now what?’ And I think that’s an incredibly empowering and motivating and uplifting perspective, as opposed to an incredibly depressing recipe for giving up. But sometimes making that clear can take a bit of argument, because I think some people’s minds just assume I’m saying ‘settle for a life of mediocrity’, which I’m certainly not.

Kate: I love the way you’re very good I think at putting things into words where there’s a strong visual image or a metaphor or something that helps you latch on to that idea. Just then I was thinking about – perhaps it was in the same chapter – when you’re out in the rain and you don’t have an umbrella and there’s a point at which you give up on the idea of trying to stay dry, you just embrace the fact that you’re getting really, really, really wet.

And then you don’t have to worry about staying dry anymore because you can move on from that idea and then work out what you’re going to do next. You do that time and time again, where you take these ideas and latch them onto something. One thing I found frustrating about 4, 000 Weeks, which I loved so much, is that I felt like all the engaging philosophical details and all the wonderful quotations just sort of left me.

And all I was left with was this kind of stark 4, 000 Weeks thought, which really haunted me. How important is it to try and figure out ways to help people remember and, and make it so that more of what we’re reading stays with us?

Oliver Burkeman: That’s a really interesting question. I think probably what you’re identifying there is that I’m definitely, like a lot of us, I think, maybe a lot of people who are drawn to my work, someone who historically goes at life intellect first, thinking I’m going to try and figure things out and come up with a plan, as opposed to intuition first and feelings first, and maybe some of what you’re picking up on in 4, 000 Weeks is that that is at least in part an attempt to work out what we do about this fact that we’re so finite – and I think that’s an important thing to do, right? I don’t think you can just abandon that and float through life without engaging your intellect in that way, but there’s clearly another thing which is feeling your way into a different way of living. As that famous old saying goes, we don’t think our way into new ways of acting, we act our way into new ways of thinking.

And so I think there, in that aspect of actually embodying a different way of being in the world, a more fulfilling or creative, whatever way of being in the world, it’s really helpful to have those kinds of. images to hold on to. I know in my own sort of personal psychological journey, whatever, certain kinds of images have been absolutely the most effective way of keeping something on the boil in the back of your mind as you go through your day.

It’s not enough to just be totally convinced by somebody’s argument. That rainstorm thing seems to me so powerful. For me, it was really powerful to sort of experience. It’s that sense of, right, yeah, what if I just stopped clenching every muscle in my body to try to be against the world that I’m moving through and actually just entered it in a more relaxed way.

And of course, the other way that metaphor, that image is so useful is that, save for a few exceptions, like if you’re carrying lots of very important legal documents or something, it doesn’t matter at all that you get soaked in a rainstorm, everything that you were bracing yourself to avoid because it would be somehow terrible if you acknowledged it, isn’t terrible in the slightest. And I think there’s something really important there about how much of the suffering that we bring on ourselves in life is through resisting experience rather than through the actual content of the experience. So yeah, I guess it’s my own slow progress into actually embodying things instead of just thinking about them.

Kate: And when we do go through those difficult things actually sometimes things aren’t great, outcomes aren’t great, but when we go through them I think many people would agree that the moments of greatest change have been when we have come up against something difficult and we’ve come through the other side.

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, oh yes, and it’s like, it’s not that once you relax into the rain in every single life context, it’s gonna be fun. It’s that the relaxing into it doesn’t kill you or even hurt you. If what you’re relaxing into is a painful experience, the painful experience is genuinely painful, but it’s like that sort of, you know, distinction they make in Buddhist circles between pain and suffering.

It’s like, actually the way to metabolize a negative experience like that is to be there and not to try to hold it at bay and brace yourself against it.

Kate: And you talked about Marcus Aurelius writing about, we cross that bridge when we come to it. And the idea that we worry all the time about these things that might happen, but the fact is that when they do, we deal with them with the same tools that we have in that present moment that we’re worrying about them. And actually, most of the time, we kind of have what we need to overcome these challenges. And there’s something really heartening about the fact that even way back then, Marcus Aurelius was busy worrying about worrying, right? The same things a lot of us do.

Oliver Burkeman: Yes, absolutely. And I mean, I think that is something that we’re all just sort of, you know, rephrasing in ways that fit the time that we live in. But that idea that, right, I mean, firstly, we put a lot of effort into trying to make sure that we’ve thought through everything that could go wrong.

Two problems with that. Firstly, you can’t think through everything that might go wrong. So actually, your present moment self is just not up to this task. But secondly, we don’t have enough faith in our later self to deal with things that do go wrong And of course, there’s a continuum and there are experiences that just about destroy people, but the vast majority of what we tend to worry about the content of that worry is stuff for which the correct response is ‘You made it this far through life. If you’re not a complete failure and everything you’ve ever tried to do Then clearly you’ve got some resources. So maybe you’ll have them when the thing gets difficult in the future.’

Kate: My friend Emily who read along with me, we’ll be hearing from her later where we’re feeding back on our field testing of Meditations for Mortals. It’s structured over 28 days, each day has a different nugget, an idea for you to think about and then if you choose, incorporate that into the 24 hours that follow. I said to her, I was interviewing you, if there was anything she wanted to ask you and she just wanted to know if you had a favourite out of those 28 days.

Or are they like children?

Oliver Burkeman: Well, we have one child, so I’m very happy to say that he’s our favourite. I think the first one, the first day, which is called, ‘It’s Worse Than You Think, on the liberation of defeat’, is important to me because it really sets up this whole idea I’m trying to communicate that when you really accept, or at least somewhat accept what our human situation is instead of fighting it, you know, when you see that there will always be too much to do, that you will never understand everything that’s happening, that you’ll never be able to control the future, that’s actually relaxing, that’s actually freeing and empowering.

It’s when you tell yourself that it will be very, very hard to get through everything that needs to be done that you struggle. When you see that it’s not very hard but impossible, there’s like, Oh, I see. So there’s a whole spirit of that, and in that section is where I mention this line from the Zen teacher, Houn Jiyu-Kennett, who said that her method of teaching students was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.

And if you can see, and if I can explain in the book, you know, how this connects to what I’m saying, I think that’s an incredibly powerful image, because it’s like, ‘Oh, I see. I was trying to do something impossible. It wasn’t that I was a loser for not having done it, or figured out how to do it. It’s that it’s not something that humans can do. So now what could humans do?’

And then I guess just to finish the section in week three about letting things happen as opposed to making them happen and about allowing for the possibility that things you’re embarking on and situations you’re entering might be easier than you thought. It’s quite dear to my heart. I’ve always found that a very difficult thought to get my head around, that something could actually be quite easy and not require a sense of grueling ness. So that’s quite powerful for me as well.

Kate: One of the things that resonated with me most strongly was the idea of living a provisional life. One where we just have to get through one set of problems and then we’ll have clear air on the other side to do dot, dot, dot. But I felt I was reading this book from quite a comfortable position of having a lot of agency and choice over my life. What can we do when we’re in periods where we don’t feel that way, where we feel like we don’t have a choice? Sometimes we all go through periods where it doesn’t seem like we have the luxury of choice.

And lots of people might say that that’s true for them. you know, that that’s the norm for them. This is really interesting terrain because I’ve noticed in both this book and earlier writing that there’s a category of insight into life which is both really easy for me to say in my relatively fortunate position and also true.

Right? So it’s like, it’s a difficult conundrum because the way we talk and have come to talk in the recent decade or so about privilege can sometimes make you think that, that if a viewpoint is expressed from a relatively privileged position, then it must be wrong. Actually, it can just be right, but a lot easier for someone in my position to deal with than for somebody in a tougher position.

So when it comes to choice, there’s this very important insight from, I guess, existentialist philosophy, really, that in virtually every situation, there is a sense in which you really do have a choice. You really are deciding between options. It’s just a question of weighing the negative consequences. And I have this quote in the book from Sheldon Kopp, the therapist, ‘You’re free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.’ And of course that can sound glib. And you might feel if you’re somebody who’s working in an incredibly grueling job that you absolutely hate, but it’s the only way you can see to put food on your family’s table that you don’t have any choice. And I think the existentialist view there is to say, well, It’s not that you’re going to give up your job to pursue your dreams of writing novels and let your children starve.

But the fact that this is on some level a choice, it wouldn’t violate the laws of physics to do it, it would just be really bad, but you could do that, as long as you see that even there there is a kind of a choice, not a choice you’re going to be able to take, but a choice that a human could in principle opt for.

It actually has the effect of lending more value and meaning to the choice that you are making because it enables you to see ‘oh actually what i’m doing in this situation is choosing to go through an experience that I hate in a society that is unjust to the extent that people like me have to do things like that, but I’m doing it for a reason that I care about, right, which is supporting my family in this case. And making that connection between how you’re spending your time and something that you care about is incredibly powerful.

Of course, it’s then very easy for people to object. Are you saying it’s okay that people have overstretched lives and terrible low paying jobs? And absolutely not. That’s a political and a societal question. But on the individual level, you’re always, in some sense, choosing. And if you can see the sense in which you’re choosing, even when it feels like you have no choice, I think that that can actually create a sense of greater agency over your life, because you’re understanding why you’re doing it.

Because the fact is that if you did not care about the wellbeing of your family, in that hypothetical example, then you might abandon them in that way. So, it must be that you care.

Kate: Do you think… one of the reasons this book is so charming, it’s very relatable. You’re very honest about your own failings and yet at the same time you’re someone who is a white male who’s a successful journalist, bestselling author. I wonder, do you ever have doubts about your own point of view? And I say this as someone who’s a relatively privileged white middle class woman who has doubts about her point of view all the time.

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I do, but it is those doubts of, am I conveying this in a way that is alienating, pretty much always, rather than, is this wrong?

Because the process of writing these books and of reading all this material and going into the philosophy and talking to people and everything is the process of figuring out on what level I think I’m talking about a timeless and universal truth of being human. So yeah, I mean, you would never want to say you couldn’t be wrong about that, but I think that the process of writing the book is pushing back against the risk of just glibly declaring everyone’s life to be a certain way because my life is.

When it comes to the examples that one chooses, right, when it comes to the ways in which one suggests implementing this stuff, then it’s completely like, yeah, for certain people this is going to be doable and for certain people this isn’t.

And in a way, I sort of want to defend the idea that different books can be for different people. I’m someone who has a certain amount of autonomy over how I structure my day. Now, that does not mean that I can do whatever I want. Over the course of a week, I feel very burdened by lots of things that I feel like I need to do for various reasons and for other people and the rest of it, but the sort of choreography of a day is very often up to me.

And so clearly, all sorts of techniques like, why don’t you spend the first two hours of the day doing this, are going to be limited to people like that. But the thought underneath them, which is, for example, that there is always a limit to the amount of tasks that you can process in a day, and that there are different times of the day when you’ll be better suited to certain kinds of thinking or work.

That can be true for everyone and worth understanding for everyone, even if then, yes, on some level you have to make a concession to contingent demographic properties when you bring it into examples and techniques.

Kate: And you’ve been thinking about life optimization, can we call it, for a long time, and I love that you’re very honest about the journey that you’ve been on, trying all these different productivity methods and ultimately failing at them, and changing your mind about them.

Have you come to any conclusions about that moment where something we’re trying to incorporate into our lives sticks and becomes something that we do? What makes things stick? I think ultimately The way to think about this is that eventually certain things just become things that you have no difficulty wanting to do and finding time to do because they matter to you enough.

Oliver Burkeman: So I’m thinking in my case about writing morning pages, three sides of a notebook, free writing, which I do pretty much every day and have done for decades. Definitely becoming a father meant I had to find ways to do that, or put it on hold for a while, or do it at funny times of day. I don’t have total control over my early mornings, even to this day.

But, basically I’ve done that a lot and found it incredibly useful, and I think the reason that it has stuck. is because a lot of the time I just want to do it because I have found the experience to be so anxiety assuaging and useful and interesting and then that’s enough to carry me over the days that I don’t feel like doing it because I just have enough evidence at this point that the day is going to go better and I’m probably going to be better to get along with if I do it so then I will sit down and write.

I don’t particularly feel like writing here today but I’ve feel like it’s usually a good idea, so let’s see where this goes, you know, just literally writing that. So it’s really getting to that point where the feedback starts to make it clear that why would you not want to do this thing? And I think some of the directions I explore in the new book can be seen as ways of getting to that point.

Kate: I’d love to ask you a bit more about your reading. There’s a wonderful bibliography at the end of Meditations where you expand a little on the books that you are drawing on in each chapter. Is there one book in particular that is a touchstone for you? You mentioned Marcus Aurelius being the inspiration behind the way it was structured.

Oliver Burkeman: I don’t think it really works for me, like there’s just like one book that is the book of my life. It’s definitely seasons and stages. And then I can very easily think of a handful of books and they divide into books that I find inspiring because of how they’re written as a writer and then books where the content has made a big difference to my inner growth or whatever.

One that somewhat combines those two is this book by this Jungian psychotherapist James Hollis called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, which I’m not convinced is a perfect title, because I think some people might be put off by not wanting to accept the possibility that they’re in the second half of their life.

But of course, in the Jungian tradition, the second half of your life can begin, like, in your late 20s, right? Doesn’t mean you’re only going to live to twice that. The point is that there’s a moment in life when ways of living that have served you pretty well in young adulthood seem to stop serving you well, and it’s time for something else, something maybe deeper or less ego-focused and that book came for me at absolutely the right time and is really beautifully written So that’s the one to mention I could mention many of them.

Kate: I’m smiling because when I was looking through that end section that’s the book that jumped out at me It did sound good. Have you ever been in a book club? What do you think about book clubs?

Oliver Burkeman: I’ve got only positive thoughts about book clubs But the question is have I ever been in one per se and I think I would have to say no I’ve been in meditation groups that have read things and talked about them, but no, that wasn’t a book club.

Kate: And are you a reader outside of work reading?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I have this problem, which is that I read all sorts of things that fascinate me for work. And then when it’s nighttime and I want to read something as I drift off to sleep, I end up reading quite trashy, sometimes the spy fiction or like, I don’t know, even Victorian detective stories or something. And so there is a whole world of good contemporary and recent fiction that I don’t know when I’m supposed to do it. And as a result, I’ve got big gaps in my reading there.

Kate: My friend Phil, who comes on the podcast very often, he’s a very, I feel, highbrow literary reader, but last thing at night, he will always settle in with what he calls ‘a good dumb book’. I think they’re very, very important to have in the mix.

Well, to return to Meditations, one of the things I loved most about this book was your way with a last paragraph. So each chapter you’re getting all these different ideas and examples and then just this always so rewarding little last paragraph that sums it all up and leaves you with something.

And I was looking at the one at the end of day 28 where you write, ‘You might easily never have been born, but fate granted you the opportunity to get stuck into the mess you see around you, whatever it is. You are here. This is it. You don’t much matter, yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. The river of time flows inexorably on. Amazingly, confoundingly, marvelously, we get the brief chance to go kayaking in it.’

And that line, ‘you don’t much matter, yet you matter as much as anyone ever did’. I love that. That’s so good.

Oliver Burkeman: [laughs] Thank you very much. You’ve actually picked a, uh, obviously, that’s at the very end of the book, so I think I’m in a more elevated register than I am perhaps at other points in the book, but it’s always a challenge, that part of a piece of writing, because you’re sending people off into the post having read the book…

Kate: But I don’t think I’m spoiling the ending am I because there isn’t really an ending it felt very open this book, it’s almost got a circular quality to it and definitely this sense of this openness, that the reader will then go off and do their own explorations and start trying to live it

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, and I think the philosophy that I’m trying to unpack or bolt together here would be completely undermined by any sense that having gone on a four week journey through it you’d reached closure and could tie a bow on it and move on.

The whole point is that, yeah, one of the many ways in which we are limited with respect to our time is that time is open, that experience is unending, that you’re never at the point where something terrible couldn’t happen in the future, that you’re never at the point where you know for a fact that something that’s happened in the past turned out for the best, right?

We’re just in this constantly ambiguous space and really the challenge is to create lots of cool things and enjoy ourselves in that context rather than first of all try to solve that problem and then do all that.

Kate: Well, it’s a wonderful book. I always love the books that I feel get people talking and provoke conversations. And I have had so many brilliant conversations with people about this book. So thank you for writing it. And thank you for coming on to talk to me about it today.

Oliver Burkeman: I’m so glad to hear it. And thank you so much for giving it so much of your time and attention. That means a lot.

Kate: Pleasure!

Oliver Burkeman there. And so if 4000 Weeks was more of an intellectual exercise, exploring the problem of our finitude, Meditations is intended to be a more practical book that encourages us to move beyond thinking to action. It’s not the longest book in the world, and you could devour it in one sitting, but Burkeman’s intention is that the reader works through it more slowly, one chapter a day over 28 days.

Keen to field test this month long retreat of the mind, I recruited the most high powered woman I know. When not running her firm of city headhunters, steering the charity she founded, Run Kids Run, parenting her three young children, and also sorting out the move to a new house, Emily Bohill found time to read along with me.

But her quest to lead a saner, freer, more enchantment filled life began much earlier, when she encountered Oliver Burkeman as a London venue more usually associated with those who want to expand their physical horizons.

Emily Bohill: I went first to a talk that Oliver Burkeman gave at the Royal Geographical Society.

And I hadn’t read it, it was just the day it launched. And then I listened to it. And then I did the readalong with you.

Kate: And he reads the audiobook, doesn’t he?

Emily: Yes. I loved having his voice in my ears. But actually what I found from the talk he gave, it was almost too much information to absorb.

Because he comes out with these statements and you meet many of them with, ‘Oh my God, yes, that’s so true’. But you need to digest it. So actually, the talk was a waste for me, because I’m sure he spoke about a lot of good stuff. But this one quote, ‘You are free to choose however you wish. You may only face the consequences.’ floored me. It’s so simple. So obvious. But actually, I came away from that going, that’s a definite takeaway. And so I then thought actually I really want to read this book over time and that framework of 28 days suited me really well.

Now, did I read it every day? No, but that leads us very nicely to Daily-ish.

Kate: Daily-ish! The idea of daily-ish is that it builds in the fact that we will probably stumble, that we probably won’t manage to do this thing every day into the intention at the outset. So that instead of saying, I will do something every day, you say, I’m going to try and do this thing daily-ish and over the course of a week, if I’ve managed to do it five days out of the seven, I’m doing really well.

If I’ve only managed to do it two, hmn, I maybe want to try and see if I can just get a little bit more done every day because I’m trying to do this thing daily-ish and somehow that embracing of the flaw and the imperfection at the outset means it’s far more likely that you actually will complete something.

Emily: It proves the point. The opening day is entitled, It’s Worse Than You Think. The Liberation of Defeat, and I think that is perfect. We’re mortals, we’re flawed mortals. Acknowledging that makes my shoulders come down like three inches. For me, Duolingo is a great example of daily ish in action. Because I’ve got a pretty good streak going.

Inspired by my father, by the way. I think he must be on almost a 3, 000 day streak now. And my parents are incredible with Duolingo. Every day, two and a half hours. They do two and a half hours of Duolingo a day? What language are they learning? Name the language, they do it. It’s insane. You pass by my mother and she’s on Spanish, you pass by, in fact I think she’s completed Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Irish, all of it.

I kept seeing this and thinking, God, they’re amazing. What a great streak to have. And then I thought, I’m never going to achieve that unless I just start. So I started. And then, obviously, with the busy life, I can’t do it every day. But I do it most days. And Duolingo’s clever. They’ve figured out that you can commercialize.

in human nature. So you can buy streak freezers. I do it most days. I didn’t do it yesterday because I had a busy day at work. But I know that I can just buy my way out of this. I think I have a 750 day streak now, which has probably taken me 1, 100 days. That’s fine. That’s amazing. I’m curious to know what happens when you get to 3, 000.

Do you actually get a visit from Duo in person? I’d like him to come and I could shake his wing. Yeah. My dad will find out. So imperfectionism, that is the sort of guiding mantra of I think this whole Collection of little essays, which is about embracing our flaws, embracing our limitations, embracing our fears, perhaps embracing our doubts about outcomes and about the fact that we’re wary of venturing down paths where we’re not sure.

What will happen and we’re not in control. So a lot of this book is about teasing out different ways to almost, like, liberate us from this prison that we put ourselves in, right? Because no one else puts us there. I think that was one of the, almost like, quite difficult things I felt I was learning from this book, which is that the only person limiting me from doing anything is myself.

Yeah, and The only way to get going is just to get going. He talks later on around Save Du Monde. Someone did this, so it’s worth giving it a shot, because anything is possible. But we do limit ourselves by making things bigger in our head, or if you’re a procrastinator, like I am, indecision is comfortable, because the perfect is still achievable, whilst you haven’t taken a single step.

It’s so interesting that idea, isn’t it? What we call a comfort zone, indecision and not choosing to do things, we prefer to procrastinate and not do them, and we call that state of being a comfort zone, but Burkeman points out it’s not a comfort zone, it should be called a discomfort zone, because you don’t feel good, you actually feel anxious, and stressed, and low level worried about these things that you’re not doing.

How much better would it be if you actually ventured down that path, if you actually did a bit of the thing that you’re worried about doing, or just spent time with the thing that you’ve been putting off doing, and see how that makes you feel. And before you know it, through some kind of psychological magic, you might find yourself actually doing that thing.

And then you will be in the comfort zone, which is living your fullest life. doing the things that you feel you want to do. That is the true comfort zone. We need to get into that. That’s where he wants us to be. Scruffy Hospitality was another, it felt like it was the gift. We get so caught up in the idea that we have to make our houses perfect and we have to have absolutely delicious food and everything has to be just before we invite people over that actually we might not invite them at all because the whole process of getting ready to have them over is so stressful and he said actually if you go to someone’s house and you do see Crumbs on the counter or maybe you go to the bathroom and there’s an unflushed toilet.

You don’t judge them in fact You feel the kind of privilege because there’s an intimacy and an honesty in that you’ve been able to see how they really live There’s a connection there. That is a really precious thing. And so he says Just embrace scruffy hospitality, invite people over without doing any prep whatsoever.

Eat the food that you have in your fridge, because they’ve come to see you and the time that you’re spending with them, where you’re not feeling anxious or stressed about the fact that you haven’t hoovered before they arrived. That’s the goal and that’s what you want to enjoy. And since reading this book, I have very much taken the concept of scruffy hospitality to heart.

How about you? Take me as I am. I grew up in an environment where scruffy hospitality was very much in action because my mum worked. She didn’t have time to be making the house immaculate and she wasn’t precious about furniture or artwork or anything. And there was a poem that she used to quote, which was Quiet now cobwebs, dust go to sleep I’m rocking my babies and babies don’t keep We can waste so much time tidying But actually be in the moment Enjoy the fact that you’ve got your mates around Or you’ve got your baby in your arms Does it really matter that things are a little bit scruffy?

No, because what’s going to be remembered By your guest, by your baby, by you Whoever you’re with is the warmth that you create and the experience. And it’s how you choose to spend your time. I remember cleaning out the PTA shed. Talk about

a room you don’t want to go to.

Yes, I really did not want to go to that shed.

I think there might be

actual rats in that shed.

Yes, yes, and I did not want to befriend them. And I was being managed by another mum who had So she was pointing at what needed to be done, which was the job I would have liked, but I was the heavy lifter that day. And at the end she said, Oh my God, you’ve done such a great job.

Your house must be immaculate. And I thought to myself, it absolutely isn’t because this is how I spend my free time is cleaning PTA sheds and not my own home. But yeah, I enjoyed that concept of Go to the shed, always say, How do you eat an elephant? Bit by bit.

Is

this

an Irish phrase? Is this like when you said to me, that’s the badger.

And I was like, what? What does that mean?

I mean, elephants are not native to Ireland. So I don’t know where that has come from. How do you eat an elephant? Bit by bit. How do you attack a big task? You just have to get going and break it down into chunks. And we put stuff off because we’re like, Oh, it’s too big.

But actually, you just get going. And he talks, doesn’t he, in the book around that PhD student who just cannot even contemplate the task ahead. So it’s, OK, how much time do you think you could give to it? And she ends on 15 minutes. How much time could you tolerate? Like, what could you bear doing? Yes. 15 minutes doesn’t feel like a lot.

It allows you to just get going. And trading perfect for good and done. There’s a lot of time where like, Oh, my head, it’s perfect, but I don’t want to start because I’m going to have to accept that I’m flawed. And the project is probably going to be flawed. And I think that’s where Procrastinator lives.

As long as you procrastinate, you don’t have to make any decisions, you don’t have to live with the flawed outcome.

You work with a lot of busy executives and there was a chapter I really liked where he said we live our lives almost as if we are the busy executive sitting at a desk and someone is going to bring us the decisions.

Someone’s going to bring us a folder with all the decisions neatly. in place and then we have to just sit there and sign it. But in life, no one is bringing us the decisions. We have to look for the decisions we want to make. Sometimes we might not choose to choose. We might. Avoid making those decisions and so one of the many practical things he encourages you to do is to look for a decision that you can make.

If it’s maybe even just a small choice, look for it and choose and then move on and gradually you might find yourself moving on as opposed to being stuck in this place that actually, as previously discussed, isn’t very comfortable.

Yes. When I look at successful people in industry or people who just get stuff done, what I’m always struck by is focusing, the ability to know what really matters and what to overlook.

And I think there’s that William James quote, the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. Really efficient people pick their battles. They are very good at filtering stuff and that, to me, is always a goal. What really matters here? My best friend, Laura, has this phrase, Not my circus, not my monkeys.

To me, that links to the allowing other people their problems. We’re inundated with bad news. There’s a lot of challenging stuff going on right now. But I really liked the call to action of defining your capacity to care. What would you go to Downing Street to protest against? Don’t go as extreme as the bloke in the book does.

He decided, didn’t he, that he felt so distressed by all the things that were going on in the world that he just didn’t want to hear about any of it. And so he had made a lot of money in the tech industry and so he was able to live in semi seclusion on this farm he bought in rural Ohio and everybody who had any contact with him had to follow these rules and these rules were, no one was to mention anything to do with them.

Current events or politics or what was going on in the world He did not want to know and when he went to the coffee shop He’d have his headphones in so there was no chance of him accidentally overhearing anything and as a result Apparently his own personal happiness index went up quite significantly.

I feel like perhaps for his friends and family Theirs went down depending on how they felt about it He had any friends but that same bloke Was planting a forest. That’s right. So when people said this is outrageous You can’t just set yourself apart from the world and how insane privilege do you have to be to do that?

It turned out that also he bought this area of land and he was pouring his own money into restoring it and making it a beautiful Ecological haven and that was his project That was his one thing that he was doing and the legacy of that will potentially last for generations. So it wasn’t all bad He definitely

had focus and zero distraction.

It does come up later in the book. Burkeman talks about distractions and that they’re not a bad thing. I don’t know. I don’t know how you felt about that day. I

Is this the chapter? Yes. So occasionally I would feel I came up against the fact that, by and large, one of the endearing things I found about this book was how relatable it was and how he presents himself as a case study of a sort of flawed, very imperfect human.

Very occasionally, I found his position as privileged as indeed I am, but male, slightly exasperating. Yes. Particularly, I think, when it came to Managing to do things and not being distracted and you know anyone who’s a busy working mother managing children and family There’s just no way around it The fact is that they call it the mother load in the majority of domestic tasks and responsibilities Tend to fall to that person since it was like to be told here are ways that you should be practicing Focus amidst the distractions.

I was like Oliver, are you seriously telling me? Yes. He would be the first one to agree. I don’t feel he’s saying I have all the answers. Because he wrote it for himself, didn’t he? Exactly. And it’s more, here is a book that he wrote for himself that he’s offering up hoping that other people will be able to take things from it.

And it’s true that some chapters you will feel very seen and you will feel very much like, oh my goodness, this is exactly me. And there are other chapters where you won’t be able to relate so much and I think The breadth of it is one of its strengths, that there is, I think unquestionably, something in this book for everyone.

We could easily, couldn’t we, sit here and chat for two more hours about this book, and more. One of the things I love is that it’s an ongoing conversation that you’re going to have with yourself, you’re going to have with other people. I’m curious to know, generally, it seems to me your experience with the book was a positive one.

Do you think it’s changed your life?

I don’t think it’s changed my life. I think it has given me lots of comfortable frameworks and there’s been challenging parts where it talks about your comfort zone is not your comfort zone actually. So there’s been lots of takeaways that I can apply but it hasn’t.

And it’s a book I tell other people about and I gifted a few for Christmas and I will revisit it. Do you think it’s going to change your life?

To be fair, he’s not suggesting it is going to change your life. No. What he asks you is, would you like a saner, freer, more enchantment filled life? To which the answer is yes, and yes.

And, I don’t know, I love some things which this book has given me, which I absolutely have taken on board. I think I need to keep going back to it. I think I need to keep practicing it.

You talk about imperfection being a theme of the book. I see lots of forgiveness. There’s a lot in this book of, look, you are flawed, Emily.

But knowing it is the first step and then you crack on and get it done anyway and to me That’s very inspiring, lifts a

load. I loved the fact that you were reading along with me. It meant a lot to know that I wasn’t doing it alone. It’s been so great talking about it with you. I know we will continue talking about this.

Thank you for doing it with me. What a pleasure. Thanks, Kate.

That’s nearly it for this episode. Huge thanks to Emily for joining me and to Oliver Burtman. Meditations for Mortals is available in all your usual retail outlets, libraries, and I highly recommend the audiobook, which he reads. If you do decide to work your way through the book day by day, then my advice is not to worry if you end up missing a day or more.

Remember the mantra daily ish, and pick it up when you next have time. Maybe find a few people and read along together. It’s a fantastic book for discussion. Although, you’ll probably end up mostly talking about it to people you meet at parties, and you’ll find it’s excellent for this. I can’t guarantee the book will change your life.

I myself have struggled these past couple of weeks because January, and also, world news. But I do feel like I have a toolkit now of helpful ways to reframe things when life feels overwhelming. And I could possibly even muster up a Marcus Aurelius quote or two, at a pinch. Because our time was limited, I didn’t manage to work in any discussion of my favorite chapter.

They’re just for us readers, about how to deal with your mounting TBR. Answer? Treat it like a river, rather than a bucket. But I’ll leave you to discover the rest of that one for yourselves. If you’d like more from the Book Club Review podcast, why not sign up to support the show on Patreon? In return, you’ll get a weekly ish minisode, access to the chat forum, where you can swap book recommendations with me and other pod fans, And there’s still time to join us in a read along of War and Peace.

We’re doing 100 pages a week. At the higher tier, you can join the monthly book club. In February, we’re reading All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringly. And in March, it’s Hateship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage by Alice Munro. We meet over Zoom on the last Sunday of the month, with a recording posted to listen to anytime if you can’t make the live session.

Find all the details at the link in the show notes, with a 7 day trial, so you can check it all out for free. Next up for us, we’re diving into Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium. But will health resort horror become our new favorite genre? And will we love it as much as we all love Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead?

Listen in to find out. Until then, thanks for listening and happy book

 

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