Enlargement over happiness
Good morning, friends! Can you believe this is the ninety-ninth of these newsletters?
As I write this, it's Sunday, and I'm a little behind on my own newsletter reading. I may have oversubscribed to these things over the course of the pandemic; now my email's "newsletters" folder has nearly a thousand unread items in it. I'm slowly reading my way through them, but boy, is it ever a lot.
While catching up on a few, though, I found this post by Oliver Burkeman. He's writing about that awful feeling of waking up in the morning and, before you've even had a chance to appreciate being alive one more day, feeling the tidal wave of things that must be done sweep in:
...I observed that many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of "productivity debt", which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I'm falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output.
If that wasn't dreadful enough, he tightens his focus a little more, and adds:
It's as if I need to justify my existence, by staying "on top of things", in order to stave off some ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head.
And:
What if – and personally I find this thought almost unthinkable in is radicalism, but still, here goes – what if there's nothing you ever have to do to earn your spot on the planet?
His suggestion for coping with all of this is a perspective shift:
What if you worked on the basis that you began each day at zero balance, so that everything you accomplished – every task you got done, every tiny thing you did to address the world's troubles, or the needs of your household – put you ever further into the black?
But all of this reminded me of a Guardian piece Burkeman wrote a couple of years ago:
There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating. Today more than ever, there’s just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on your time – all the things you would like to do, or feel you ought to do – and the amount of time available.
Or this other thing Burkeman wrote, in which he quotes Gary Keller:
It's not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do. It's that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.
It's his final piece for the Guardian, though, that offers an easy, useful framework for evaluating things you have to do, or choices you have to make:
When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response.
Sometimes, then, when that tidal wave arrives in the morning, maybe the best thing to do is nothing at all. I've quoted Raymond Carver's poem "Rain" in this newsletter before—just twenty newsletters ago—but it's worth returning to:
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. Fought against it for a minute.
Then looked out the window at the rain. And gave over. Put myself entirely in the keep of this rainy morning.
Would I live my life over again? Make the same unforgiveable mistakes? Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
I slept in today, and it was marvelous.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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