Madye Stromboli’s Reviews > Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts > Status Update

If anything, it's constantly berating yourself that's the self-indulgent path. Reflecting the inner taskmaster's hubristic belief that they can bully you into doing anything, merely by shouting loudly enough. Facing up to reality means facing up to the reality of your moods, desires, and interests too.

To inquire what your life task might be, is to switch your perspective in a manner that makes it possible to think new thoughts. It permits you to dig beneath the crust of assumptions that all to easily end up governing a life: that you have no option but to continue on your current career path, or that you mustn't make choices on which others might frown...

That's why indecision can feel so oddly comfortable. Its a form of postponement - a temporary avoidance of the painful sacrifices involved. Put differently: its a way of trying to dodge the inevitability of consequences. To make a decision, any decision, is to take ownership of the situation instead.

had to switch to an audiobook because someone put a hold on my copy of the book 3

My wife vividly recalls the moment in her teens, after a childhood steeped in moviegoing, when she realized that if something obliteratingly awful were to happen to her, or to someone she loved, it wouldn't be foreshadowed by sinister film music. No: it would just happen. Anything always could.

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.