This is a book about how the world opens up once you realise you're never going to sort your life out. It's about how marvellously productive you become when you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive; and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you'll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don't absolutely need to do any of them at all). It's about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never befully resolved. In short: it's about what changes once you grasp that life as a limited human being--in an era of infinite tasks and opportunities, facing an unknowable future, alongside other humans who stubbornly insist on having their own personalities--isn't a problem you've got to try to solve. The twenty-eight chapters in this book are intended as a guide to a different way of taking action in the world, which I call 'imperfectionism' --a freeing and energising outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren't obstacles to a meaningful existence, which you must spend your days struggling to overcome, en route to some imaginary point when you'll finally get to feel fulfilled. On the contrary, accepting them, stepping more fully into them, is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life--and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in history. If you decide to read this book at the suggested pace of one chapter per day or thereabouts, my hope is that it will function as a four-week 'retreat of the mind' in the midst of daily life--a way of actually living this philosophy here and now, and doing more of what matters to you as a result, instead of mentally filing it away as yet another system you might try to implement one day, should you ever get a moment to spare. After all, as we'll see, one main tenet of imperfectionism is that the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be 'out of the way', so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now. So I sincerely hope you find this book useful. To be completely honest with you, though, I wrote it for myself. Excerpted from Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
