Find Your Lightness of Being by Caring a Little Less About Everything
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The medical technologist administering my sonogram to look for any masses the mammogram machine may have missed in my dense breasts keeps riding the jellied probe over a specific location like she’s detected something, something alarming. “Do you see anything?” I ask nervously. She waits a few beats to respond while she maintains her iron focus. “The radiologist will have a look,” she says finally—a comment so vague and inconclusive, I can fill it with my imminent demise, and I do. But as I sit in the cold, dark room, waiting for the radiologist to review my results, an uncanny feeling sets in—fear mixed with an odd sense of relief. Selfishly, I think: If I am about to die, I’ll no longer have to worry about anything—not retirement, or my parenting missteps, or my weighty (unaccomplished) goals, or neglected friends and family, or my ever-expanding to-do list.
For that fleeting moment when I consider the freedom in store if I were to die, I have a sudden shift in perspective like an astronaut looking at Earth from the moon and see with perfect clarity all the ways we humans overestimate the meaning and impact of everything, and how that robs us of levity and joy. Why do we do that? How do we stop? And if the cultivation of meaning is a fundamental component of happiness, how do we cope when it feels too heavy to hold?
Practice Non-Attachment
“It’s really not meaning per se that is weighing a person down. I would say it’s their relationship to meaning,” says Richard Davidson, PhD, a distinguished professor in the department of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has spent more than two decades studying meditation and mindfulness with the Dalai Lama. “It’s not about letting go of meaning. It’s more about letting go of our attachment to meaning, which is what really causes suffering,” Davidson explains. For instance, we might try letting less consequential concerns (an email we forgot to answer, an unreturned phone call, or an argument with a loved one) float past us like clouds in the sky, rather than cling to them as if they are of critical or defining importance.
Since bedtime is when all my anxieties collect—my kid’s summer camp bill, a costly car repair, a hard conversation I have to have with a friend—and conspire against my ability to sleep, I’ve begun saying, “Just a thought” as each heavy cogitation emerges. It’s a phrase that riffs on something world-renowned meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, often says that I find soothing: “Just this. Just this. Just this,” as in “Just this moment and nothing more,” and it restores me to an easier sense of self.
Scale Back the Stakes
Oliver Burkeman, who elegantly contemplates our relationship with time in his beautiful new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, offers his insights on how to loosen our red-knuckled grip on meaning.
Burkeman argues that far too many of us hold destructive beliefs about how we should maximize every second. Otherwise, we think we’ve somehow not fulfilled our cosmic purpose or paid our existential debt. “We have this notion that for life to be meaningful, you’ve got to do something that resounds down the centuries, or changes the world, or makes you famous.” We conflate meaning and extraordinariness, he explains. “But I’m making a case that it’s actually really liberating to see that almost no decision you face in life is going to mean anything in 100 years’ time.” Some people hear that and a pleasing thought saunters through their consciousness: “‘Oh, I don’t have to hold the weight of the world on my shoulders,’” he jokes. “But my argument is ‘You never had to in the first place.’”
Once we recognize that the stakes aren’t high, we can adopt a “Why not?” attitude toward all we want to accomplish in life: Why shouldn’t I start a media literacy program for kids? Why shouldn’t I write an epistolary memoir on the queer American experience? Why shouldn’t I prepare the paperwork to move to Nova Scotia? As a “let’s just try and see what happens” point of view takes root, the gravity of my gravest desires—the 100-pound rock in my bag of dreams—crumbles and I’m able to walk with a lighter, swifter foot toward the things I truly want in life, big and small.
Pick a Few Goals
Burkeman, who used to write the Guardian’s cheekily titled “This Column Will Change Your Life,” calls himself a “productivity geek” who was once “obsessed with trying to find the perfect time management system and the perfect way to stay on top of everything.” Once he realized the futility of his quest—that you never master your to-dos or your self-discipline—he says he felt freer to abandon nonessential or unfulfilling tasks, even goals he valued, to prioritize ones in greater alignment with his sense of purpose or that better served his happiness. “Human limitation means you’re probably going to have to abandon a lot of your ambitions in order to really focus on a few of things,” he says. It’s ultimately about leaning into the notion that “something’s gotta give,” and acclimating to the fact that you’re going to sometimes disappoint others (ie. failing to respond to an email, a call, or a social invitation) and the expectations you set for yourself (falling short with your kids, or an exercise regimen, or a project). “Eventually, you realize there isn’t this phantom of like, ‘There must be a way to not have to drop any balls and to be perfect in all domains,’” Burkeman says. That’s when you start to create space for a liberating lightness of being.
Making an honest assessment of what brings me the most satisfaction and joy—being able to get my daughter at 4 p.m. and walk through Sunset Park, Brooklyn, every day; coaching her through homework and reading and doing work I love (writing and teaching)—helps me quickly decide what I can let go of (a steady paycheck in corporate America that will expend all my resources and rob me of family time, and scaling back on gym visits or friend meet-ups to work on a larger writing project, etc.), and relieves me of the stress of “great expectations.”
Create a Record of Accomplishments
Keeping track of what you have accomplished, alongside what you still need to do, helps balance the weight of things, says Burkeman. “We wake up in the morning and it’s almost like we’re in some kind of cosmic existential debt, right? You’ve got to pay it by being productive and getting back to a zero balance,” he says. But it’s an impossible bill to settle because our to-dos never stop growing. It “shifts your perspective”—and balances out your burdens—to consider what you’ve already brought to fruition, he explains, emphasizing, “You could have literally done nothing." As long as you choose the right comparison, you won’t get overwhelmed by measuring yourself against outsized standards of productivity and accomplishments.
As a freelance writer who juggles multiple stories in various stages of development, some days feel utterly unaccomplished, like I’ve got nothing to show for it. Tallying up what I actually did do, however small, against the notion that I could have folded my hands behind my neck and stared up at the sky from a patch of grass all day (not an unappealing idea!) takes the sting out of stories I’ve failed to submit.
Recognize Your Significant Insignificance
“Remembering your cosmic insignificance and how tiny a human life is in the span of cosmic time has a relaxing effect. I think, Oh, it kind of just doesn’t matter, and it makes it easier to make choices. If the stakes are lower, why not? You might as well” do whatever it is that grabs your fancy no matter how small or big the challenge or risk, he explains.
Contemplate Your Oneness with the Whole
Sheldon Solomon, PhD, a professor of psychology at Skidmore College and coauthor of The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, who studies how the consciousness of our mortality informs our unconscious beliefs and behaviors, adds that it’s not a nihilistic point of view to consider our infinitesimal place in the universe—in fact, it’s oddly comforting and freeing, and can elicit uplifting feelings of awe and deep connection, as studies indicate.
“The older I get,” Solomon says, “the more enamored I am with the idea of being radically inconsequential—that even though we’re an inconsequential speck of respiring carbon dust born in a time and place not of our choosing, and in an unfathomably large universe benignly indifferent to our faith, we are nevertheless cosmically connected in a significant way to all that is. I find that for me, at my best, tremendously liberating,” he says.
Ethan Kross, the author of the brilliant book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, similarly recognizes that the vastness of time and space can help us access a sense of awe, making it “hard to maintain the view that you—and the voice in your head—are the center of the world.... When you feel smaller in the midst of awe-inspiring sights—a phenomenon described as a ‘shrinking of the self’—so do your problems,” he writes.
I’ve had that experience countless times walking through Sunset Park, the second-highest point in all of Brooklyn, with my 6-year-old daughter’s small hand in mine. As the red, pink, orange, and yellow hues of the descending sun take over the sky and I gaze up into its colorful immensity, nothing in my life—none of my various registers of meaning—feels big enough to distract me from “just this, just this, just this,” this ineffable moment that defies language but somehow says everything that matters.
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