The Limits of Control and Zen Buddhism Creative Writing

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Burkeman, Oliver. \"The Intimate Interrupter.\" Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, . pp. 101-109Burkeman uses the story of Steve Young to make the point that when we distract ourselves from something unpleasant we only make the unpleasant thing worse for ourselves: but by attending to the unpleasant thing we can escape its unpleasantness and meet it head on and without as much suffering or agony or distress as might be the case had we tried to flee it. Distraction is what we should really strive to fight: it is the thing that keeps us from attending to the present. Even those things that we have as goals—we don’t achieve them because we know it takes hard work, focus, energy, and commitment—and we can distract ourselves now with some fleeting sensation that satisfies for a moment (and then we chase after another and another) rather than focus on the end goal and get it done because distractions give us momentary dopamine hits; the end goal’s reward is too far away. Distraction rewards now—but it prevents us from reaching our goals.

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This is the point that Burkeman hammers home: “whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude—with the human predicament of having limited time...” (105). He goes on to explain why boredom is actually a profound experience: it is recognition that one has limited control over the thing, the moment, the essence of now. Confronting that limitation is good for one, though: it was how Steve Young mastered the art of meditation; it is how one master’s control over oneself and frees oneself from succumbing to distraction after distraction. The goal of life is not to avoid the thing that we feel shouldn’t be happening, but rather to accept that it is happening and to be okay with that.For this annotation, I focused on using active voice......

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