At the recommendation of Carrie Reuning-Hummel I picked up and read Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

The book resonated with me deeply because it gets at many of the philosophies of life I already embrace. I am curious to what extent his book shifts people who are actually enrolled in productivity traps and planning paradoxes. We’ll see what impact this resource has on culture at large– based on the delay it took to get the book, already in it’s second printing, I have some idea.

Though I consider myself a member of the choir to whom he is preaching, I’d like to underline some of his points and indicate the shifts the book will have on my life.

His ‘time management’ system is simply an examination of time itself. If you start from the abstract, from the top, from the reality of death, then to-do lists seem absurdly silly. Most things do.

It’s an effective way to put our weeks into context.

Burkeman emphasizes, over and over again, that our human lives are finite, not infinite. This emphasis helped me to understand that visioning, brainstorming, planing, rivering, and world building is purely fantastical unless it is grounded in the reality of what a physical human being could do with a limited human lifespan.

A human life cannot contain both a lifelong quest to be a premier salsa dancer and a chinese medicine expert who serves their community and changes the perception of health and wellness. I can imagine both, but I can’t be both.

Or, perhaps more true to my own compulsions, I can want to be both a long distance through hiker and an in demand summer institute teacher. But I can’t physically do both.

The mind is capable of fantasy. The internet is full of infinity. But we, humans, are not.

One of our closest held fantasies is that we will not die. That we are immortal. Even if we can intellectualy acknowledge our mortality, the gut bounces off of the fact. Buddha says, “Death is a fact, not a punishment.” But this runs against the grain of our cultural avoidance not just of death, but the simple acknowledgement of it.

This is true in the smaller sense, too. We feel that childhood will last forever, we think our studios are infinitely expansive and another child will come along and teaching will feel effortless and easy, or that at some point on a distant time horizon we will feel at peace.

To commit to anything in the moment is to, quite painfully, un-commit ourselves from every other possible option. And, if we try to circumnavigate that particular law, we end up committing by default to uncomitment. Aversion is simply a shied. A fantasy. There is no way but through. And it is going to be painful.

This is a helpful lens through which to look at my rather ambitious goals, my studio enrollment, and the language around time I use in the studio and with parents.

The fact of the matter is we only have one life, one childhood, one lesson a week, and one point to settle on each lesson. Life is settling. We must be careful when we chose what to settle on.

With this in mind I am proud of some of the efforts I’ve made around seasonality, my future biography (link) and using this very blog posts to publish as many ideas that I won’t do as ideas that I have done. Releasing responsibility is just as important as taking it on. By determining the reason for the season, the limitations of a life, and the ideas I won’t be able to act on I protect the time to do the single thing that is of utmost importance.

Burkeman also recommends something called cosmic insignificance therapy wherin you get in touch with how insignificant your life is compared to the whole span of human history. You recognize the absurdity of willing yourself to be of the same significance as Einstein, Shakespear, and Socrates. There are only a couple dozen figures who will be remembered in our collective history, Jesus and Buddha are among them. Why in the world would you mount upon your life the need to lead a life of recognition at their scale? It is okay to die without a legacy. Or, to use a line from Shunryu Suzuki, “To live is enough.”

For Suzuki teachers this means holding the whole history of music and education in our mind. Over the course of human civilization (6,000 years) what purpose has music served? How miniscule is the paradigm of concert performer or album sales at that scale? You do not need to ‘produce’ a concert artist. You do not need to send a single soul to music school. If you unshackle yourself from that obligation what do you actually wish to do with your students? It is okay to simply make music. To adapt a line from Shunryu Suuzki, “To experience music is enough.”

From the book I was inspired to reframe my practice charts from a ‘to-do’ list to a ‘to-experience’ list.

At Burkemans suggestion I started reviewing my done lists, not just my to-do’s. As a habitually future focused individual, acknoledging my past is in some ways more important than aniticipating what is to come. It is okay to celebrate.

Burkeman applied his advice to humanitarian/social work. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels overwhelmed by the number of issues we are faced with. The issues are so overwhelmingly complex that no human could understand them fully, let alone multiple issues fully. The cultural pressure to keep up with the news and one dilemma after another is really a hysteria disguised as duty.

I don’t intend to bury my head in the sand, but I am wrestling with the expectation to perform your own indignation at every single conflict that arises. From the war in Ukrain to the impending death of our planet. It is overwhelming simply to confront these realities, let alone react publicly in real time to them.

At the end of the day we are responding to a feeling of needing to do something. Because the needs in the world are so great, our need do something engulfs our physical ability to act. This leads to discordance within the self. Burkeman argues that simply committing to a manageable effort (volunteering at a single organization once a week, for example) quells that need to act. I’m not so sure. But his other recommendation, to acknowledge that the world is broken, is no more palatable.

So, as Ithaca Talent Education prepares to record the Ukrainian national anthem in solidarity with Ukraine, I work through in this journal, on my own time, my relationship to activism. I am unsettled and uncommitted. But that might just be the way life unfolds anyway.