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Book reviews: A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas, and Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

by
17 January 2025

Stephen Cherry reads two authors offering a secular spirituality

THE book A Beginner’s Guide to Dying explodes with life. Simon Boas was diagnosed with stage-four cancer in his mid-forties, partly because a GP misdiagnosed his symptoms. Rather than take this as an occasion for self-pity and misery, he responded by recognising the privilege and delight of being alive at all. When he was not continuing to work or enjoying a glass of Muscadet with his wife or an afternoon pint with a friend, he put pen to paper.

The firstfruits were three articles in the Jersey Evening Post, the second of which went viral. This little book republishes those pieces together with a collection of joyful micro essays on the matters that crop up when you are close to death.

Given that survival was not a possibility, it is remarkable how much positivity and delight Boas squeezes on to each page. He also ponders the great questions of life and, abandoning the atheism of his younger years, finds a satisfactory theodicy in the thought that “the only way we can be truly human, with all of its joys and sorrows, is for bad things to happen for no reason, and for us never to know whether there is a God.” The alternative — for us to know for sure of the existence of God and for God to determine everything — would be like living in North Korea.

His section on “how to interact with the dying” draws on the clarity that comes from both experiencing people getting it wrong and a remarkably forgiving sense of humour, and is humane, understandable and useful. As he notes, they are mostly, “don’ts”, such as “don’t skirt around the issue”, “don’t minimise”, “don’t offer medical advice”, “don’t force religion (or lack of it)”. The positives matter, too: “do get in touch”, “do offer help — but be specific”. And above all “do listen”. But, as he says, many people think they’re good at listening when they are not.

Throughout the book, Boas shares his insights to what is meaningful and constructive. He particularly singles out counselling and psychedelics, but there is a strong Buddhist flavour, with his emphasis on the erosion of ego, the importance of relational connections, and the need for clear-eyed realism.

A flavour of Zen also runs through Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals, a book presented as a “retreat for the mind” with 28 short chapters divided into four weeks. The idea is to read a chapter a day, seeing what sticks rather than desperately analysing and trying to retain. But, if reading five pages a day is too much for you, there’s no need to worry, as sooner or later you get to his idea of “dailyish”.

Burkeman invites people to step back from the pressure to maximise productivity and to be your “best self” and embrace the path of imperfectionism, recognise that living with unsolvable problems is realistic, wise, and healthy. His approach might be most useful to people who have overdosed on the false and problem-generating orthodoxies of time-management.

Not that the book is tip-free. There’s the idea of writing a “done” list rather than a “to do” list — I can already feel the boost of “have written” and much prefer it to the feel of “must write”. Then there is his idea that welcoming people into the scruffy everyday reality of your home is more hospitable and respectful than over-preparing. This works as a metaphor, too. Welcoming people into the scruffy unfinishedness of your thinking might be more useful to them than being in “tell mode” — as if you really had thought through all the big issues.

And why not try the reverse golden rule: treat yourself as you would treat others? And equally, why not recognise that, more often than we think, distractions and interruptions are reality itself trying to break through the artificial barriers created by our ego-based control-freakery?

Both Meditations for Mortals and A Beginner’s Guide to Dying offer experience-based, Zen- and Stoic-influenced approaches to life before death, but lived with full consciousness of it, which offer critiques of relentless demands for productivity and oppose the false values of growth and achievement.

Fundamentally, they are about how we live wisely with the constraints common to all conscious bodily beings; they are about how we inhabit time without worshipping the clock, calendar, and spreadsheet. They are about acceptance — of self and reality. But — and this is what sets them apart — they are about transcending the ego, letting go of certainty, and embracing an interconnected, imperfect, constantly in-flux way of living and thriving. They are secular approaches to spirituality.

The Revd Dr Stephen Cherry is Dean of Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge.

A Beginner’s Guide to Dying
Simon Boas
Swift Press £14.99
(978-1-80075-503-1)
Church Times Bookshop £13.49

Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts
Oliver Burkeman
Bodley Head £18.99
(978-1-84792-761-3)
Church Times Bookshop £17.09

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