Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts *Staff Pick 2024*

From Oliver Burkeman, author of the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks, a four-week journey to embracing your limitations, thriving in an age of bewilderment, and finally making time for what counts. How would life open up if we stopped treating it as a problem to be solved? Meditations for Mortals takes us on a liberating, invigorating journey toward a more meaningful life - a journey that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but the reality in which we actually find ourselves. It brings themes at the heart of Oliver Burkeman's bestselling Four Thousand Weeks - our finite time, the lure of distraction, and the impossibility of doing anything perfectly - into our daily lives, offering a powerful new way to take action on what counts in an overwhelming era. How can we embrace our non-negotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there's always too much to do? How to shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can 'get on top of everything'? And what if purposeful productivity was often a matter of letting things happen, not making them happen? Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology and self-help, it offers a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice - and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully. Designed either as a four-week 'retreat of the mind', or to be devoured in one or two sittings, Meditations for Mortals will be an insightful companion offering wisdom that sinks into your bones - a source of solace and inspiration and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In our anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.