18/09/2025
*A string of beads*
(Another helpful blog from Oliver Burkeman)
Obviously, you don’t need me to tell you these are dark, unsettling, apocalyptic times. Almost everyone in my British and American social circles seems rattled by the shooting of Charlie Kirk and the ensuing crackdown on expression in the US, and/or by the resurgence of nativism and anti-migrant feeling in the UK, all of it unfolding on top of ongoing horrors in Gaza, climate instability, and the possibility that artificial intelligence might kill us all.
There’s an unmoored sense of anxiety, a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis – the feeling that there’s little to be done about any of this, yet that it’s impossible to concentrate on anything else instead. Even people with a talent for shutting out the headlines seem troubled by a sense of reality crowding in on them, or maybe pulling the rug from beneath them, making it harder than ever to pursue the projects and relationships that add up to a rich and absorbing life.
I trust you won’t be shocked to learn that I don’t have a conclusive answer for dealing with any of this. But there’s an image I find surprisingly liberating – actively useful and perspective-shifting, I mean, not merely consoling – that’s worth unpacking here. It’s the idea of seeing the actions you take from hour to hour, through the day, as a matter of threading beads onto a string, as if you were making a necklace.
This comes from Paul Loomans, a Zen monk who mentions it in his excellent book Time Surfing (which I’ve praised here before, and which was recently re-released in English as I’ve Got Time). “If you look at the day’s activities as a string of beads,” Loomans writes, “you will see it’s made up of all different kinds: large, weighty beads and small, carefully painted ones; eye-catching multicoloured ones and unassuming, softly coloured ones.” Your morning shower is a bead; so is a client meeting, or writing a couple of paragraphs; so is playing with your kids or making dinner. And “when viewed from the broad perspective of time, all beads are equally important. They’re all pieces of our lives.”
I’m aware this all might sound a bit mundane, so let me explain the three reasons I think it’s so powerful, at a moment in history like this one:
The first relates to how much of our anxiety arises from engaging with world events at the wrong level, so to speak, a phenomenon I’ve previously labelled “living inside the news.” For a variety of reasons, including how online media works, we tend to think of what we’re up against at the abstract level of social forces and global trends, “authoritarianism” or “the rise of racism” or “the Trump administration” and so on. But these aren’t things any one person can actually ever do anything about. (We sometimes fall into a similar trap in the personal realm: ideas like “the state of my relationship” or “starting a business” are likewise too abstract for concrete action.) The result is an antsy, frustrated and disembodied way of being that somehow never quite makes contact with reality.
By contrast, when you’re contemplating which bead to add next to your metaphorical string, you’re inevitably in the world of things that can genuinely be done, things that are in your gift to do. You might choose something directly connected to world events: volunteering your time, giving money, making your voice heard, or even something big, like planning a run for office. Or you might not — because the kids’ packed lunches need making; or because writing your novel is also important to you; or because you have a plan to meet a friend for coffee, and things like friends meeting for coffee is a fundamental component of how the world should be. The point is that whatever you do, you’ll be acting in the world you can affect, not the entirely conceptual one that leaves you only anxious and frustrated.
A second helpful aspect of the idea of threading beads, as Loomans explains, is that it conveys the sense that all the beads matter equally. This means that the one you’re threading right now can receive your full care and attention: for the time being, it’s the only thing that matters. That makes it easier not to be jostled by thoughts of all the other things you could or should be doing with any given portion of time. And it’s a reminder that the big, impressive beads aren’t any more constitutive of the necklace than the unassuming ones. Doing the laundry, fighting authoritarianism, getting creative work done, spending time with your children, taking a hot bath: it makes little sense to deem any of these definitively “more important” than any of the others. They can all belong in a life. It’s just that right now, you’re doing one of them; at some other time, you’ll be doing something else.
Which brings me to the final point: adding a bead to a string is something that can only happen here and now — so the image helps me let go of the future, and the anxiety that attends it. It can be striking to realise that anxiety, whether about the news or anything else, is never about what’s happening now, only about what it might result in later. (Terrible things are happening now too, of course, but they’re a cause for anger, sadness or helplessness, not anxiety.) Seen this way, worry is the activity of a mind repeatedly trying to obtain reassurance that the worst-case scenario won’t occur – but failing, over and over, for the simple reason that the future hasn’t happened yet, while we finite humans are confined to the present. It’s simply not within our power to feel certainty about what’s coming later.
What is within our power is to thread beads, one after the other, and gradually to develop the internal trust that we’ll be able to thread the beads that need adding in the future, too. (The opposite of anxiety, I’ve seen it said, isn’t calm, but trust in your capacity to handle what happens later on.) All you need to do, to paraphrase Carl Jung and also Anna from Frozen, is the next right thing. Indeed, when you think about it, that’s the only thing you ever could do: select the next bead and add it to the string, then choose and add the next, and the next, through apocalyptic times and happier ones, for as many years as you’re lucky to get to do it.
I find this thought calming – but not just calming. Energising and empowering, too. Often enough, amid the frazzledness and disorientation of contemporary existence, it makes me positively excited to go and select my next bead.
[Follow for more like this]
