The British-born Zen master Roshi Jiyu-Kennett used to say that her philosophy, when it came to teaching students, wasn’t to try to lighten the burdens they carried through life, but to make those burdens so heavy they’d choose to put them down. I’m no Zen master (I do have the requisite baldness; it’s just that I’m still working on the boundless equanimity). But I’ve always loved that line, because it gets at something profound about the stressfulness of existence.

To spell out what I take from it, which is something a Zen master would never do: most of us subliminally spend our days scrambling to get to a point where we feel like life’s finally in working order, and everything’s under control – which for you might mean total financial security, becoming the perfect parent, leaving your childhood traumas entirely behind, or anything else.

The “burden-lightening” approach, as preached in a thousand self-help books, involves somehow actually reaching that place of safety. The burden-increasing approach, by contrast, involves pointing out that the goal was impossible all along. And when you grasp that you were chasing a mirage, you’re disinclined to keep chasing. You get to relax into life as it is.

Which is easier said than done. Though perhaps slightly easier than usual right now, at a time when all sorts of things we tend to tell ourselves we need to do – to be happy, or secure, or to justify our existence – have been rather obviously impossible to do. You just can’t do a full-time job at full throttle while caring for small children; you can’t be absolutely certain your relatives are safe from the pandemic; you can’t guarantee your family won’t feel the shocks of economic meltdown. Etcetera.

Of course, realising this doesn’t magically make it fine to be overstretched, sick or struggling financially. But it triggers a kind of inner liberation. You’re still in a bad fix, but you’re no longer staking everything on achieving an impossible kind of escape from it. Moreover, the result of this shift isn’t that you become passively resigned to your fate. Instead, you’re more motivated to take whatever useful actions you can.

Recently, I’ve noticed that I read the news with a similar subconscious yearning for something impossible: deep down, I think I’m hoping I’ll find some confirmation, somewhere among the headlines, that everything will eventually be OK with the world. So there’s a certain solace in realising that things already aren’t OK. That ship has sailed. All the thousands who’ve died from coronavirus have already died; the Arctic ice is already melting; many species are already gone. And the question of how spectacularly ill-qualified you can be for the US presidency, yet still make it to the White House, has already been decisively answered.

Whenever all of this pops into my awareness – when I realise I’d been trying to convince myself that we aren’t really living through dark times, when the fact is that we are – I’m always surprised when what follows isn’t an all-consuming sense of horror and despair, but a surge of bracing, roll-your-sleeves-up pragmatism. Very well, then: so this is how things stand. Time to figure out what, if anything, I can do about any of it.

Listen to this

Archive recordings of Jiyu-Kennett’s uncompromising but witty talks on Zen are available on YouTube.