Oliver Burkeman

Kate Bowler: Does life ever feel like an endless to do list? Like if you could just wake up tomorrow with a little more discipline, you’d finally master your schedule, achieve balance and feel enough? You are not alone. I really feel that way too. It’s the exhausting hum of modern life whispering and sometimes shouting that if we just work a little harder and develop a better system, we can finally conquer the chaos and feel whole. And it is never louder than at the start of a new year. I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. And I think it’s time to get off of this “new year, new me” train. We want to be the kind of people who grow. Who change. Who become. But we’re tired. We have loves we can’t set down or lives we can’t control. So then what do we do when new selves feel out of reach? But we still want to try. Or at least try to try. We’re calling it Try January, a month of weekly love notes and a couple of reflection questions sent to your inbox for anyone who’s just trying. Not perfecting, not transforming, just showing up. It’s a gentle invitation to embrace what might be possible in this season of messy starts and half-finished lists. So if that sounds like the kind of January you want, subscribe to our email newsletter and join us. Go to katebowler.com slash newsletter and I’ll be sure to link it in the show notes, too. Seriously come on by. It’s going to be it’s going to be try-y.

Kate: Today’s guest is the perfect companion for this season of trying. Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and author of 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. And it’s a book that I give to anyone who feels like they’re losing the race against their inbox or calendar, or who just needs a reminder that their life is so much more than the sum of their plans. This conversation was so fun. We recorded it live at St Martin In the Fields. It’s an extraordinary church in the heart of London that hosted us for this event. And hey, the pastor is Sam Wells that you might remember from one of my recent episodes. And in this conversation, Oliver and I unravel some of the beautiful lies we cling to about time and control. The fantasy of hyper-efficiency and what it might look like to embrace the limits that make us who we are. This is a conversation about limits, not as something to overcome, but kind of as a doorway to something richer, deeper, and, dare I say, more human. So if you ever feel like the finish line keeps moving or wondered what it might look like to live well with a life that’s deliciously incomplete, you are in the right place. You’re going to love it. Here goes. Hey, friend.

Oliver Burkeman: Hello.

Kate: You wrote this absolutely punchy and kind book called 4000 Weeks, in which it has the title is Time Management for Mortals. And I wrote the book, No Cure for Being Human. And our books are best friends because they were written within a month of each other. And it turns out that we were both very worried about the same thing, which I think is finitude. We’re both a little worried about it, death and whatnot. And and I think initially what stresses us out is that we live in cultures that are suffused with answers for the problem of finitude, the rampant $12 billion a year self-help industry, which tells us that we can fix our life, master our life, best life now. So I wanted to start there. When did you first become obsessed with the questions of “fix it” self-help?

Oliver: I’ve been sort of interested in that stuff for a very long time. The way that the column that I wrote for The Guardian got going was that I was reading all these kinds of books and like I trying to be covert about it, but I had them like around the office. And the editor of mine on The Guardian Weekend magazine saw that I was obsessed by these things and thought she might as well get some content out of the obsession. So I so I started writing about it. I think I thought when I got into this stuff that I was just going to be mocking ridiculous things because it’s fun to mock ridiculous things. And it’s a defense mechanism to mock ridiculous things to some extent. It turned out that what was much more interesting and compelling to me writing that column was actually the bit where you tried to provocatively suggest that there was something interesting in there, some important questions being asked and maybe even answered sometimes by some of these books.

Kate: When I read self-help and I’ve been working on this big kind of history of self-help over the last couple of years, I just find that I, I largely see my own desires to build a meaningful life. I have time blocked. I have sticker charted. I have created, I have optimized my morning routine. I am a self-help monster, I’m pretty sure. And this feels like a confessional space. So I guess are you also a monster?

Oliver: Yeah, I’m sure. I mean, I think those questions that are being addressed often in extremely cheesy or charlatan-ish ways, but the questions that are being addressed are incredibly compelling, I guess, to everybody, but certainly to me personally, I was always, you know, I’m always fond of pointing out this distinction between philosophy and self-help would not have made much sense to sort of ancient Greek and Roman, you know, stoicism and all this stuff is intended to be therapeutic. It’s supposed to it’s supposed to help. And I think that was actually one of the most interesting things of sort of getting into writing about this field was being contacted by people, often disproportionately men who are clearly, you know, very, very grateful for a way to address these questions and sometimes, you know, a little bit of mockery of the worst solutions to the questions is the way in. You know, I think it’s a yeah, especially maybe it’s British people as well.

Kate: When we’re trying to build meaningful lives. What do you think are some of the most common myths that might stand in our way before we can absorb wisdom that could be useful?

Oliver: I mean, I guess the one that really I ended up writing a whole book about it, the one that really sort of struck me for many years was just the very broad concept of positive thinking, right? Positive thinking, broadly defined. The idea that you can decide which emotions to have and which and which thoughts to have. I remember very vividly being at a motivational seminar in San Antonio in Texas, where they made us all jump up out of our seats and punch the air and shout, I’m so motivated, which is like.

Kate: Which is what we’re going to do here tonight.

Oliver: I was going to say that’s like, this would be like, this is torture for a British person, right? You can’t you can’t make British people jump out of their seats and shout, I’m so motivated. But actually, the adventure of that book was coming to see how much I while disdaining these expressions of that idea, how much I had bought into it and it dawned on me after far too many years that if you make a big plan for your life and then you try to carry it out like the second day of trying to put a plan into practice, it feels completely lifeless and depressing. And you and you hate the fact that you’re supposed to be following it. I don’t know. Does that resonate with you?

Kate: Yeah. It’s such a “new year, new you” kind of feeling. It’s just also such a deeply American obsession, right? That positive thinking comes out of late 19th-century theologies of the city. Like what makes some people rise and some people fall. And now it’s mostly every blond woman in a hot yoga studio who really wants to explain manifesting to me. But I think the feeling that I didn’t realize was so much a part of my own intensity was maybe not some of the like, change your words, change your life, sort of stuff. Yeah, I guess. But the idea that I could change my life and that it was my sheer will and that if I just tried and tried and tried and then tried again, that that’s been, I think, really core to who I think I am. I guess I always think of like the supercharged fifth-gear version of this control narrative and that it is really hard to settle into any other kind of wisdom about lives that come together in lives that come apart. Unless I start to maybe question my feeling like it’s my life, that I’m able actually, through my thoughts and deeds and actions, to shift the gears in my life

Oliver: Right. And it’s such a recipe for anxiety and self-reproach and all the rest of it, because I think when I write in my book about coming from a family of sort of compulsive planners, people who put a lot of emphasis on making sure they know like what’s due to be happening for the next month and just experiencing the way that that’s kind of just an unending. You never get there, right? No matter how much effort you put into trying to exert control over the future, there’s always the next bit of the future to try to plan so you can never actually rest. And in any kind of in the in the peace of mind that I think that we compulsively planners think we’re getting ought to.

Kate: We think we can just grab from the future.

Oliver: Then it’s just, well you know, then the obvious explanation is that you’re just not quite disciplined enough.

Kate: You gave this, I thought, really horrible argument in your book about why if you become more productive, it only makes your life worse. And the a great example seemed to be email. Can you just use email as a metaphor? Why am I never going to get ahead? Be specific about my life.

Oliver: The reason you are always going to feel overwhelmed by by email. It’s sort of a humorous thing, right?

Kate: You mean devastating.

Oliver: But it gets at something very true about efficiency. Talking about efficiency here, talking about trying to get the feeling of being in control, being the master of your life, being the master of your time through fitting more things in to the available time. You can deny your mortality by, you know, biohacking and trying to live to 200. Or you can deny your mortality by accepting that you’re probably going to die when people die but you’re going to fit an infinite amount into the finite life, which is another kind of sort of defiance of death. And if you and if you do that, it seems to me and I think that it’s not just me, but that if all you do is try to make yourself or any system, organization, anything just more efficient, able to process more stuff faster, all that happens is you just attract more and more inputs into the system. So likewise, if you get really good at answering email at a fast clip, the main thing that happens is you get a lot more email.

Kate: People are like, this guy is really fast with an email.

Oliver: You respond to people. They reply to your replies. You reply to their replies. You know, it goes on forever and you get a reputation for being like responsive on email, so you have someone who is worth emailing. And it’s, you know, it’s not just email. It’s like if you work in an office where a certain kind of project comes up very frequently and you get faster than anyone else at processing that kind of project, like what do you think’s going to happen? You’re going to you’re going to get given all these projects and so you’re going to get busier as a result. The reward for good time management is more work, as they say. And that basic dynamic–

Kate: Yeah.

Oliver: –Is what is going to happen unless you start to just make really unpleasant sacrifice-involving decisions about what you are and aren’t going to spend your time on.

Kate: That lands on such a hard, I guess because I got very sick when I was 35 and then I thought, well, if I’m going to die this year, I should probably, I just I could hear myself, I was saying like, I just need to get it. I just need to like, I just need to get it done. It. It being it being sunsets, it being I mean, I could feel that it was probably memories and that the quality, but then the quality of time had to be so loaded. But what I found as I became more and more obsessed with hyper efficiency and some of it was really lovely, like, I can go into a hospital and sit there for hours because that’s what happens in hospitals is you sit there and I could do things that mentally freed up a part of whoever I was before that felt lovely. It helped me be someone else than just a cancer patient. But I, I did find, though, that this sort of like thing wormed its way into me, though, that I wanted to speed up. And I do find it hard to then do what you’re describing, where you have to decide like what’s worth doing now that you already believe that you are limited.

Oliver: I do think it’s really interesting to me that your initial reaction to your, you know, I think more extreme than anything I have yet experienced encounter with mortality was not the cliché of instantly feeling clarity about what matters but actually a ramping up of this thing that we’re all doing.

Kate: I mean I think maybe some of it is gender. I’d already frontloaded so much of my family time into my career, so I didn’t feel like, oh no, I have a career now I have to, but I did feel like, oh great, then I will be supermom until this time. And then I think I just became super intense about hard pivots. And I think a lot of people too with caregiving in their life with, I mean things that they can’t control with their loves. I mean they’re not then choosing between, I should probably work less. They’re choosing between while I have to take care of this family member, I then have to toggle to this job I wanted to find meaningful and the solution in our minds becomes, well, then I’ll just become expert at pivoting that hard. And then it just kind of grind grinds the gears, at least in my mind.

Oliver: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that it’s wrong to try to fit more in to a certain degree, it’s that idea that it’s going to save the situation.

Kate: Yeah. I don’t like that.

Oliver: That is the problem. And to me, anyway, what I find incredibly liberating every time I sort of get back into that groove is just the understanding that there’s just no there’s no law of nature that says that you’re going to have the capacity for everything that feels like it matters. They’re just going to be more things that feel like they matter.

Kate: You said make a list. Like make a list of your top 15 things you ever wanted to do.

Oliver: So this is the Warren Buffett. Buffett was allegedly asked like, how do you go around? How do you go about prioritizing things in your life? And he then equally apocryphally responded, You make a list of everything that matters to you, goals, whatever it is, from 1 to 25, all the 25 things you care about the most in ranked order from 1 to 25. And then the top five of that list are the ones that you pour your time and energy and attention into. But the other 20, and that’s where I want to start to think like, I’ll do those in the little extra bits of time. Like I’ll make it, I’ll make an hour a day to do all the other 20. Now, he says, apocryphal Warren Buffett says those 20 are the ones you should avoid like the plague because they are the ones that are compelling enough to you that you’re at risk of giving them time. Yeah, but they’re not compelling enough to you that you that you put them in the top five. Again, I think it’s a to actually literally do that if it is one particular style of living this idea. But the basic notion, which is like there’s going to be lots and lots of things you don’t get time for that would have been utterly legitimate uses of your time.

Kate: Yeah. When you were describing the like you have to make hard choices because I’ve worked on like histories of bucket lists and I do find the, the spirit behind like, well, that’s just a shortened bucket list very tempting because then you’ve somehow distilled, you’ve kind of married that vocational Sparky animus feeling with a reasonable list. And then you go to Paraguay.

Oliver: You know, being able to shorten the list is, is everything. But bucket lists and the kind of things that people embark upon when they’re trying to get through a bucket list have this tendency to widen the horizons of things that they then want to do so that the list expands. Yeah.

Kate: I mean I do think about all the things that I ever wanted. I always wanted to have a baby and then it was hard forever and ever. But then I had a Zack but that was entirely a thing that happened to me. After years of infertility, I would never get to say why, congratulations me. But we’re so determined by all the things we didn’t choose, it does feel like a false imagination then to say, Well, my life is decided, then building a meaningful life is about coming up with the right shortlist.

Oliver: Right? Yes. Because it works retrospectively and prospectively, right? It’s like anything that you value in your life, pretty much it’s always the case. It may be always the case that it that it arose from circumstances that you didn’t choose. If you really go you know, if you if you follow that thought to its logical conclusion, of course. Because you know, your parents meeting and their parents meeting right? And it goes on it goes on backwards forever. And yet there’s this overpowering thought that like from from this moment forward, yeah, it makes sense for me to try to, like, lean over and grab the steering wheel. Even though that has Nev doesn’t account for any of the things that are really wonderful in anyone’s life.

Kate: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of when I was being really obsessed with bucket lists, like, is there a set of experiences that makes my life feel done is what I was trying to figure out. And then I thought, well, maybe it’s an age like you just have to reach a certain age and then you can and then you’ll get a feeling. And then I work at a university with almost exclusively geriatrics, and they were like, No. And also I’m never retiring. So I was like, That’s fair. I can see where this is going, that the more lovely something is, then the the richer and deeper and richer and deeper and richer and deeper it gets, which is beautiful and painful because we don’t ever want it to end.

Oliver: But what’s in that urge for completion? That’s what, I mean, I feel it completely as well, but it’s like. Yeah, there is some, there is some thought that. Well, it’s the same. Sometimes it’s completion and life being done. Sometimes it feels just like a sort of time management geeky, obsessive person like me, it’s to do with getting to the point where life is kind of just on autopilot. Like, it’s when it’s not going to take all your effort to organize it anymore and it’s just going to like cruise. That’s another it’s another version of the same thing.

Kate: Is that what you’re thinking about when you think of, like you’ve premade all the good decisions and then you want it to be like an, I don’t want to say like email filtering system, but I’m just imagining like a logic tree.

Oliver: I think for a lot of my early adult life, I was thinking that in a few weeks or months time I would get to the point, which is like, Yeah, where where it would be smooth sailing in a certain sense. Not that there wouldn’t be like difficulties and crises and emergencies, but like I would have my systems for addressing life in place.

Kate: Yeah.

Oliver: I would have the whatever I used to like manage my tasks. And however I thought about my daily routine, it would all be like fixed. And if you you see this, if you spend any time, I don’t recommend it. If you spend any time on like productivity YouTube, which is a huge, huge world of people making short videos about the perfect morning routine and the perfect daily schedule, the perfect app to organize your your life. If you go back through the timeline of just one of these people every like two months, they’re like wiping the slate clean and saying like, no, no, no, this is the app. And then they do a video on like, why I switched from notion to.

Kate: Success Wizard.

Oliver: One note or whatever right? And then why I switched from working this way and each time, it has that sense of like from now on.

Kate: Yeah.

Oliver: And it always reminds me of like, you know, people in the French Revolution or the Khmer Rouge did as well, didn’t they. Trying to sort of start the calendar at zero again in a way that is obviously in politics associated with a huge amount of violence and bloodshed, and it’s sort of like doing the same thing to your own self to be like all of what came before just doesn’t count anymore.

Kate: That reminds me of my father-in-law. I was like, well, do you have a bucket list? And he said, yeah, I kept it in my wallet forever. And I said, well, what is it? What did it say? And he said, teach my kids about Jesus. Hope to see them graduate high school. Be a good husband. There was like five totally lovely things that it seemed like in all the actions it was him having like been the person that he wanted to be. But none of it was really outcome dependent. It was like hope to this, hope to that. I liked the hope behind it because mine is more the obsession with the future. When I’m trying to think, well, instead of just imagining that the future is better, or that the you know, that there’s some other mental framework I have to be in, one thing that’s helped me is, well, what kind of time am I in based on whatever’s happening? Am I in ordinary time when I’m thinking about errands and, you know, just like the basics of life? Am I in tragic time? Does life have that awful, beautiful, bright quality that it gets when it starts unraveling and everything becomes fragile and precious. And in all of these kinds of experiences, I do find that it’s helpful then to think, well, what is a meaningful life inside the kind of time I’m living. Because sometimes in tragic time it’s like did I forgive myself for loving this much that had hurt so badly? Can I live with my humanity for a few more hours as I accept help I would rather not accept? That kind of thing.

Oliver: Yeah, I really like that. Yeah, I really like that. It’s not the same point, but it’s making me think of the idea that there are tempos and amounts of time appropriate to things in a way that is a sort of very useful antidote I find, to sort of rush and hurry of the bad kind. That there are, that there’s a, there’s the time certain things take. And, and where I go wrong in life almost always is because I’m trying to hurry the pace of things that have a that have a timescale to them that I’m that I’m not respecting because I want to be the one setting it. It’s not quite the same.

Kate: When I read that argument, I thought I totally pictured everything having its own concrete shape like  is taking your kid to school. It has this weight and mass and I like thinking of the things I love as like a blob that like takes up space rather than like compressing it into whatever I imagine my life was supposed to be.

Oliver: Yeah, that was one of the things I did and for that book that was, what made the biggest impression on me was this art historian at Harvard, Jennifer Roberts, has all her incoming students do this exercise where you can literally choose a painting or a sculpture and look at it for three hours. And it’s kind of absurd. It’s a shockingly too long amount of time to do it. But that’s all totally deliberate, right? She’s trying to sort of intervene in the rushed lives of her students and and dictate that they try something different. And even before you start looking at what the analogy of this is to other parts of life, just in the context of looking at a piece of art, you literally see things. You literally see things that are there that you literally haven’t seen for 45 minutes. And I don’t mean like interpretations. I mean just lines.

Kate: You’re like, oh, a dragon.

Oliver: Pretty much. But you have to work, I anyway have to work against everything in me to to allow that stuff to take the time that it wants to take.

Kate: Yeah. We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. One of the solutions to mortality is apparently living in the present. I do kind of find it helpful not to just think of like, well, living in the present is the only way to live a meaningful life. Like, you really love the feeling of like, well, sometimes when life is really difficult, we should live in the past. There are beautiful reminders there in the past. I always think of it like in times where the present feels unbearable, I can look back at moments that were so beautiful that they started to feel shimmery and ridiculous and lovely. And then they can remind me of a person that is whole and loved or I can look in the future and I can think of something really dumb I’m going to do that’s very exciting and poorly chosen.

Oliver: And at the same time, you’re doing it in the present, right? So, it’s the difference between sort of recognizing right in that moment of remembering something in the past, you are changing the quality of your present. This is a much better way of going about it than trying to will presence in the moment, right? And don’t come back to the old the way we began in terms of trying to will the quality of of experience. That’s the thing that doesn’t work. The thing that sends a lot of students of mindfulness meditation off in the wrong direction, I think. This idea that what you’re going to do is like focus really hard on looking at the flowers in the garden or something.

Kate: There’s like such a big body of literature in which men are given like a neo-stoicism and given like a new master, mental master of the universe roadmap.

Oliver: Right.

Kate: And I find that, on the same point, I find that so stressful for them where, like your your response to grief and pain should be impassivity. Like, it sounds really awful and boring for people who love you. But I do sometimes wonder if one of the nice things about trying to open the aperture to more meaning is knowing that there are some lovely things where if you open the door, they just kind of come in. Like, I feel that way about joy. I’ve always just found that joy is ridiculous. I mean, it comes when it shouldn’t necessarily even happen. Like you’re in a terrible moment, and then all of a sudden, you see the beauty of something or time feels elastic and stretchy, and that never feels like I, like, put myself in the right time. That feels like it’s a just that feels like a gift.

Oliver: Yeah. And I think the big question that I still don’t really know the answer to is whether, like you clearly cannot will those experiences by making a plan to feel joy at 2:30 p.m. tomorrow afternoon. There’s an old there’s a phrase that I think it’s a Zen, that it comes from, that enlightenment is an accident. But meditation makes you accident prone, right? So there’s the question in my mind is what we can do to make ourselves accident prone to the experiences that you that you’re talking about.

Kate: Yeah. I’m sure that I’m sure there’s lots of I mean, the the theological room there is big and open. I feel this way about absurdity. Like, if I want my life to be more meaningful, sometimes something that I do is I do something that’s totally for no reason at all. Like when I got really sick, I started going to go visit the world’s largest.

Oliver: Anything.

Kate: Everything.

Oliver: They’re all in America.

Kate: The world’s largest ball of twine. Minnesota. World’s largest and world smallest Paul Bunyan also in Minnesota. Not a real person, as it turns out. A mythical figure that chopw wood was a revelation to me. But absurdity has been I don’t know, it kind of cuts through the noise of some of my of some of the like pain and stress about not being able to fix the things I can’t fix. And you love is it a etellic time? Is that how you say it?

Oliver: Yeah. This idea of an activity that is not engaged in to culminate toward something but is engaged in for it itself alone. An example I give in the book is is just hiking in nature, right? You don’t you don’t do it for other reasons. You might slightly do it for the sort of cardiovascular benefits, but you don’t really. If you if you’re someone who enjoys it, there’s not going to come a point in your life where you say like, I’ve done all I needed to.

Kate: I did it. I did nature. Nature happened under my supervision.

Oliver: I was really struck when I was doing the reading and reporting for the book about how there’s something really slightly embarrassing these days about admitting to having a hobby. There’s something about people who are really into their hobbies that we disdain a little bit of being kind of like, Why haven’t they got something better to be doing? But what’s really cool to have today, if you hang out with the kids is a side hustle and a side hustle is exactly the same thing as a hobby, except that it’s instrumentalized and you’re trying to turn it into income, right? So it’s like it’s really cool to do something like that that, that finds that does not find its meaning in the doing of it. And there’s something kind of embarrassing about, you know working on your stamp collection or your new–

Kate: Say coin collection and then you’re naming my hobbies.

Oliver: Yeah. Any of your hobbies, basically are particularly embarrassing.

Kate: Things I hide. Stamp collecting I hide. Coin collecting I hide.

Oliver: And yeah, I wonder whether the sort of knee jerk jokey kind of disdain that we have in Britain the the archetype of this is like is a Trainspotting, right? I wonder whether some of the sort of knee jerk disdain we have to that is because we’re sort of we realize on some subconscious level that people who do those kinds of things are just in it for itself. Might not be true of trains, but maybe trainspotters are trying to see all the trains in in Britain or something.

Kate: Wait those are, sorry, just for catching up. These are real trains and they want to see them.

Oliver: Right. You see on lots and lots of British train platforms right at the end of the platform, you see a couple of people with cameras and notebooks, and they’re trying to collect the numbers and the details of as many specific trains.

Kate: Oh it’s like birdwatching for trains.

Oliver: It’s like bird watching, but for trains. Yeah.

Kate: That’s really nice. That’s very specific. That’s more specific than my five cent Canadian coin collection, which I have in its own binder held separately from other things. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. So between us, we’ve probably both read hundreds of books about how to fix your life. What are some of the little bits that you found give you hope or small steps, practical things that you found that you actually started doing?

Oliver: Right. Like, the first thing I started doing was thinking like, these are the. This is one of the good times. It’s one of the good moments. Yeah. And then immediately feeling like tons of pressure to, like, savor it. You know, when you have a baby everyone tells you you must savor these early months in a way that they think they’re being kind. And it’s like, am I savoring enough? But then moving to the point of just being like, no, this is like abundance. You can you can notice this and value it without having to try to sort of drill down on it or anything.

Kate: I like too even with you’re saying like the time takes what it takes. That like, then difficult, like sorrow takes what it takes. It’s such good advice for the bad things to you that you’re like, I don’t know. I’m not going to be able to savor this. I just have to endure it. And this pain is about this weight and size and it’ll take the time it takes.

Oliver: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t claim to be incredibly good at doing this every single day of my life. But I was really influenced by something that I read from the meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who has this personal practice of trying to act immediately on generous impulses when they arise. So this isn’t the advice to try to be a nicer person, right? That’s really difficult. It isn’t the advice to, like be more compassionate, which often in that kind of world that he comes from, you do get a sense that that’s what you’re being asked to do is like, make yourself be a nicer person. This is more just the idea that actually most of us to some degree are nice people, right? These kind of impulses to send someone a note to donate money to a cause, they kind of arise in us naturally. The problem for a lot of us, including me, is not that they don’t arise, it’s that you think that’s really important and I will do it just as soon as I’ve finished these 12 other things. And then you never and then you never do it. And so I think that that idea of just like not trying to generate the feeling which is a disaster zone but, but trying to turn the feeling into behavior as fast as possible if it’s if it’s generous, not if it’s angry, but if it’s generous it’s already is a really useful thing.

Kate: I love hearing your brain work on these, trying to distill the hyper action into the kind of quieter wisdom that we I guess, I think we’re just all trying to age into if we get the benefit of surviving the things that happen to us, I think we want to feel changed somehow without just being stuck on the treadmill feeling of forever. And that’s one of my very favorite things about your work. And it’s also why I continue to give your book as embarrassing gifts to people as just a gentle intervention where I’m like, things aren’t going well. I just sort of whisper and slide the book across the table. Your friends have been invited here to talk to talk to you about this. Thank you, Oliver, for making this massive trek out to be with us.

Oliver: Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you.

Kate: Oliver speaks so realistically about how we have this urge to try. To try to maximize our days, to savor every moment of these precious lives, to cram in every opportunity to make the most of what’s in front of us. And also, we have very realistic limitations on what we can do or savor or fit in. So as we stand on the edge of a new year, we’re given a chance, a sacred invitation to pause, reset and reimagine what it means to build a meaningful life, even knowing it will never feel fully complete. This is such a good time for us to ask ourselves, what could we do differently? How could we open ourselves to love more deeply? To try again where we’ve grown tired? Or just maybe to let go of a grudge or a resentment or something that is no longer serving us? A new year reminds us that while our lives may feel unfinished, there’s beauty in continuing the work, even in its imperfection. There is so much beauty in trying to try. I really hope you join us this January as we just try a little softer. Sign up for my email newsletter and you’re going to get weekly reflections on how to help us do just that. It’s totally free at katebowler.com/newsletter and I’ll link to it in my show notes too. So look, we all are just trying to take a little step in this season, so may we all move into this moment with fresh hope, trusting that every small, imperfect step will add up. So here’s a blessing for living meaningful, unfinishable lives. Here we go. Blessed are we who see the impossibility of solving this absurd, insultingly short life. It can’t be done. God, there are lists on lists and errands on errands. And it tastes like tin in my mouth of the unfinished-ness of my life. Am I counting items instead of knowing what counts? God help me live here. Seeing the whole truth of what is. Blessed are we who walk toward the discomfort bringing what gifts we have and our sufferings to whether of illness or loss, grief or betrayal, confusion or powerlessness. Blessed are we who scoot up close so we can whisper our loves, our fears. All that feels too heavy to carry alone. And all that we wish we could hold on to for longer. Show me what I love. Show me what I never want to lose. And show me what I no longer need here in this beautiful, limited life. Bless you all, my friends.

Kate: A huge thank you to St Martin-in-the-Fields and their vicar and my very good friend, the Reverend Dr. Sam Wells, for all of their hospitality and for creating the perfect space for today’s conversation. And we thank you to our partners Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School who make everything happen at Everything Happens. It is our great gift to serve you, our very favorite listeners with these new podcast episodes, with live events and weekly emails, social media posts and free devotionals and very pretty downloads. And all of this is thanks to my spectacular team. Thank you to Jessica Ritchie, Harriet Putnam, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Elia Zonio, Katherine Smith and Megan Carkleton. Thank you. We love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail and tell us about your weird hobbies. Seriously, the weirder, the better. I cannot wait to hear about it. Call us at (919) 322-8731. Or write me a note on social media. I’m @katecbowler. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.