What if you never sort your life out?

What if you never sort your life out? by Oliver Burkeman.

It’s a question most of us could do with asking ourselves. I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn’t quite the real thing, not just yet – that soon enough, we’ll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but that till then we’re living what the great Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz called the “provisional life.” (“There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that… [but] there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.”)

Meditation provides a useful model here, because most meditation teachers acknowledge explicitly that “stopping thinking” isn’t really the goal; instead, falling off the wagon (by getting distracted) then getting back on (by returning to your breath) is the whole game. One might reframe other things this way, too. Your goal as a runner needn’t be to get to a place where it’s effortless to set off at 630am, day after day. It could just be to get better and better, every time you skip a morning and stay in bed, at starting again the next day.