Meditations for Mortals (by Oliver Burkeman): A 4 week/28 day series with dailyish posts about the book
Week two - taking action
DAY FOURTEEN
Develop a taste for problems
On never reaching the trouble-free phase
On day fourteen, Burkeman reminds us that “life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one.”
This chapter is the last one of week two - taking action. In my taking a lot of action this week I’ve had some less time for reflecting on this beautiful book that continues to astound me. I am happy to share that I have six modal duets that I’ve been trying/tweaking/reflecting on and getting ready for inclusion in my new version of my book. I’m also working with the wonderful Nastasia Mousouli, a flutist, international school music educator, and beautiful human on another new section for the book called Discovery Flute Cards. These are 80+ prompts around sparking discovery in one’s flute playing. More to come on that!
So, for now, I’m going to take a few weeks off from posting and take in these first 14 chapters deeply by writing on my own, having conversations, and generally just letting the beautiful thoughts simmer for me for a moment. What has your experience been in either reading the book up to now in these 14 weeks, or reading some of these posts? I’d love to hear from you.
In the meantime, I’ll finish week two in Burkeman’s words from some of my favorite passages of this chapter. Stay well and looking forward to starting week three, ‘letting go,’ together when I return.
Here’s Burkeman from this chapter:
You needn’t reflect for long on the subject of human limitation to see that the existence of problems simply follows, unavoidably, from the facts of finitude; at the most abstract level, ‘problem’ is just the word we apply to any situation in which we confront the limits of our capacity to control how things unfold…
It takes only a little further reflection to see that we wouldn’t really want life to be otherwise. It would be nice to able to skip the scariest or most overwhelming problems. But to fact no problems at all would have you with nothing worth doing; so you might even say that coming up against your limitations, and figuring out how to respond, is precisely what makes a life meaningful and satisfying.
If I no longer have to fight against the sheer fact of encountering problems, because that’s a battle I’ll never win, I get to dive more fully, perhaps even with relish, into the problems I actually have. I no longer have to remain in the posture—absurd for finite humans, for whom time is so precious—of trying to get the present out of the way, en route to the problem-free future. And I am free to aspire not to a life without problems, but to a life of ever more interesting and absorbing ones.
Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering.
Thoughts:
Please feel free to share any thoughts/reflections on the first two weeks.
I have enjoyed the many online and offline conversations that have resulted from these posts.
Feel free to drop me a note at lauralentzflute@gmail.com if you prefer a less public interaction (the introvert in me shies away from making public comments, so I get it!)
