what I'm doing now #11
Helping my self.
helping my self
The last couple months have been, at times, brutally stressful for me. Issues of immigration and taxes have racked my mind and my body as well. My eczema flared to the worst it has been in years. Compulsive worrying postponed my sleep.
Playing soccer was a rare thing that relieved me of the heaviness of reality for good periods of time. It is truly one of the joys of my life. Contemplating it, my awe only grows as I notice all the things it gives me. An opportunity to exercise and to play. A healthy distraction from all my worries. A way to commune with friends and strangers, out in nature. All at the low low price of zero dollars. On an ordinary day, it’s a beloved hobby. In times of struggle, it’s like sustenance.
But soccer didn’t solve my problems. I still had to do that. And the most difficult part of that was stomaching the uncertainty and unpredictability of it all. Along the way, I vented to friends and loved ones about my doubts and fears, but paramount to my emotional regulation during this turbulent period was a middleaged British journalist named Oliver Burkeman via his audiobook
Meditations for MortalsMeditations for Mortals (2024)
by Oliver Burkeman
Those who distrust self-help books and who might snort and roll their eyes at this book merely for its subtitle – Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts – might be surprised at the sobriety of Burkeman’s advice. In this book, Burkeman picks up where he left off in his previous one –
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals– by revisting the grim fact that a lifetime is a
prohibitively brief window of timeto achieve even a fraction of the things we propose to do. Burkeman’s mention of mortality in the naming of his books is not an empty gesture or a marketing gambit. His writings on the topic of time-management and day-to-day living take death out of the subtext and put it where it belongs, in the text itself.
This book offers a series of cleverly angled perspectives that transform problems by considering them differently. Each chapter begins with a quote and Chapter Three begins with a brilliant one from Sheldon Bernard Kopp:
You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.
This is not a fantasy of omnipotence, but an energizing reminder of the control you do have. Reframing my role in this way – from unwilling object to autonomous subject – freed me from the futile and exhausting cycle of resent towards my circumstances and refocused my attention on what I was doing about them. As Burkeman phrases it:
[Sometimes you’ll] do the undesirable thing because you understand the cost and you don’t want to incur it. Notice how different that is, how different it feels from grudgingly saying yes because you feel you have no choice, then resenting it for days.
In short, there are two options. Do nothing and accept the consequences, or do what you can to get the result you want. Idle rage makes no sense. If the consequences are unacceptable then do something about them. If they are acceptable, accept them and move on. This directive prompts another liberating insight:
Most of the potential consequences we find ourselves agonizing about don’t remotely justify such angst.
This also helped me enormously. It simplified my conundrum by helping me realize that my primary task was to eliminate risk of actual harm befalling me and reducing the likelihood of costly consequences. That done, as long as I can fiscally, emotionally, and physically afford the potential consequences, there is no reason to worry like I am in danger.
. In a stoic yet cheerfully amused tone, his disembodied voice eased me out of my ceaseless fretting. After I finished the book I began it again, eager for more of the reassurance his virtual presence gave me. But it wasn’t just the tempering effect of Burkeman’s tone or the snappiness of his writing that alleviated my stress. It was his shrewd insight on life’s problems and the exceedingly realistic stances he took on them. I don’t care what people may say about Self Help. It helps.