Once you stop struggling to get on top of everything, to stay in absolute control, or to make everything perfect, you're rewarded with the time, ener… - Oliver Burkeman

Inspiration is for amateurs,' the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. 'The rest of us just show up and get to work.

So when you pay attention to something you don't especially value, it's not an exaggeration to say that you're paying with your life.

Because our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn't yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophobia and lack of escape routes that entails. ('Our suffering,' as Mel Weitsman, another Zen teacher, puts it, 'is believing there's a way out.')