Cozy Minimalist Home is the book I wish my clutter clients would all read. I’m always trying to get them to consider how they use their space rather than how they feel about each and every single object they own. This lavishly illustrated book shows us how it’s done. Myquillyn Smith explores how to design cute, comfortable, stylish rooms that focus on function rather than tons of decorative items. She suggests that it’s better to focus on the room as a whole, rather than specific objects. The results are charming and convincing.
We really can have “more style with less stuff.” Smith suggests that we start by creating one sane space for the household to hang out and relax, even in the midst of large remodeling projects. No matter what else is going on in the other rooms, there needs to be somewhere for regular daily life to go on. Moving and redecorating are serious undertakings, rife with pitfalls. Smith finds a lot of comedy here. “This is real life. There would be no buying all new furniture like they do on TV.” She deals with the realization that she’s been dragging a lot of decor through multiple moves, only to find that it isn’t doing her home any favors. The money she had spent on small things could have been saved up for larger pieces she would have liked better. Smith is relatable and really funny. She voices so many contradictions and frustrations: wanting to streamline and wanting to shop; feeling attracted and repelled by the same style; aiming for domestic harmony and hospitality while wanting the home done her way. She doubts her own design choices, and even her decision to buy a house that she doesn’t absolutely love. How to deal? Smith becomes Chief Home Curator. Like most of us, she has to solve problems of her own creation, sorting through a mountain of stuff that she herself chose and brought home. She learns to “quiet the room” and scrap previous design attempts before finally working out something that she and her family can love. Generally, what they like has greater design impact while using and displaying far fewer things. One of the best and most endearing features of Cozy Minimalist Home is the appendix with Before and After photos of Smith’s rooms. She shares what was going on behind the scenes as photos were staged for the book. This focus on process is so helpful for readers who don’t know where to start in their own homes, making the endeavor feel more possible. Cozy Minimalist Home is a very practical book. It teaches the fundamentals of design, starting with what order to paint, buy furniture, choose window treatments, and hang pictures. For absolute beginners, there are useful discussions on how to discover your own style, create pinboards, and plan rooms. This is a beautiful and useful book that can build confidence and a sense of possibility in even the most nervous novice. Favorite quotes: Just because we know perfection isn’t the goal doesn’t mean we don’t long for—and need—function and beauty. My dirty little secret was that my stuff was draining me. If I was so good at finding great deals, why didn’t I trust that I could find them a year or two later and not lug all that cute stuff with me from house to house? Doesn’t an empty kitchen counter seem like the most extravagant luxury? Life Admin is a wonderfully clarifying book about where the heck all our time goes. In my case, it’s blocking spam phone calls and unsubscribing from email to which I never subscribed in the first place. Elizabeth Emens gives us a new framework for discussing how we divide work in our personal, business, social, and academic lives. Reading this book should cause a lot of heads to pop up amid a chorus of voices calling, “Same!”
What is life admin? Some people call it ‘administrivia.’ Emens provides a Venn diagram showing how it overlaps with chores and childcare. We’re talking about things like managing schedules, making appointments, filling out forms, handling finances and insurance paperwork, planning parties and travel, and knowing where everything is. For some reason, almost all of this work seems to be invisible, and thus people task each other with it all the time. I don’t think I’ve gone a single day in the last fifteen years without at least one person emailing, texting, calling, DMing, or asking me in person to research something they could have Googled all by themselves. (In less time!) Send me a link, plan my trip, give me a recommendation, be my uncompensated accountability coach. They don’t even realize that just asking me these questions impacts my mental bandwidth as a writer, nor could they have any idea that they rank among dozens who see me as their private unpaid secretary in this sense. To the endless list of life admin I might add ‘making decisions.’ Almost everyone on Earth wants to outsource this to someone, anyone else. Life Admin is the armor we need to start fending off these demands, to start making this work more visible and valued. I’m considering making a keyboard shortcut for my phone that says “I will do this for you if you first donate $5 to charity:water” and see how many people (probably 100%) snippily write back “never mind.” Most people probably have a bigger issue with negotiating life admin at home than they do between friends. Emens gives reasons for this, for instance that a landlord might only contact one roommate about repairs even if there are four adults living in the house. A lot of the division of life admin is accidental and arbitrary. It can also be hard to categorize, or to tally up the work when it consists of a variety of dozens of recurring tasks that might take one minute or might take all week. The fact that life admin involves a lot more than the distribution of household chores has always been clear in my marriage, because I was an administrative assistant when I met my husband. We talk about it in terms of ‘mental bandwidth’ and we formally negotiate it during our weekly status meeting. He books airline tickets and hotel rooms while I plan our activities on the trip. He pays most of the bills, sorts the mail, and does the taxes, while I’m the one who deals with maintenance people. He does most of the repair jobs while I handle most of the mending and weird stains. He does the grocery shopping, I do the laundry. Over our decade of marriage, we’ve passed some of these jobs back and forth. The responsibilities seem to morph and fluctuate as we relocate or change schedules. The pressure valve is for one of us to say, “Will you do X while I’m doing Y, or would you rather switch?” (Cook dinner while I do laundry, etc). It’s entirely possible to negotiate life admin respectfully without it turning into a huge deal. This is one of the great strengths of Life Admin. Emens offers categories of “admin personalities” and ways that each might have a useful strategy for reducing life admin. For instance, rebelling might benefit others in the workplace by restructuring or eliminating bogus tasks. The book also offers ways of reframing life admin by making it pleasurable or seeing it as a way to, say, choose a mate, give better gifts, or get better service. One of the best and coolest of these ideas is to have an “Admin Study Hall” and sit in a group with other people for company while getting some of this stuff done. Life Admin is the kind of book, like Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up, that has the potential to really stir the pot. It’s so important to be clean and clear in our negotiations and power dynamics, though. Bringing these issues to light is the first step in fairness and happier relationships, whether personal or business. Favorite quotes: Having a hundred admin tasks that each take one minute feels heavier than having a single admin task that takes a hundred minutes. Who has time for admin-redistribution admin? ...many people seem to assume that the topic of life admin is of interest mainly, or only, to women. What I would do to figure it out is the same thing you would do to figure it out yourself. This is the book to read if you’re burned out or planning a vacation, buried in work or preparing for summer, or really just any reason. In fact any of Laura Vanderkam’s books on time management would be a good idea. She is here on a mission of mercy to tell us that we have more time than we think we do, and we deserve to be spending more of it relaxing.
The title 168 Hours arises from the number of hours there are in one week. This is true for everyone. It’s true whether you have kids or don’t, whether you have a job or don’t, whether you’re married or single. Time is the only thing we all have in common. It’s our perception of where the time goes that is different. Vanderkam has built her writing career on studying people’s time logs. How do we actually spend our time? What are we doing and how do we feel about it? Core competencies are the things we’re best at, and that’s where Vanderkam recommends that we put our focus. One of the reasons to keep a time log is to find out what those are, because we don’t always realize there is something else that would be a good use of our time. I’ll toss one of mine out there, because at one point I was spending quite a lot of time on it and now I’m not. That thing is language study. I have a true knack for languages and I can read six writing systems. There are few things I find as exciting as learning to read and understand a new language, so it’s really a mystery why I keep prioritizing other things. The only time I would be likely to remember this is at the movie theater, where I’m surprised and delighted that I can understand, say, a sentence in Russian or Japanese. Would I remember to write something like that down on a time log? This is where the “List of 100 Dreams” of 168 Hours comes in. Ms. Vanderkam, if you’re reading this, I am writing exactly ten years after you wrote down your “List of 100 Dreams.” How did you do? How many of these dreams have you explored in the last decade? I know at least one has, which was to write a best-selling book. Congratulations! But we’re so busy! we cry. Working every minute! We work a hundred hours a week and more! Vanderkam doubts this and she has thousands of time logs to prove it. She also recommends that we find the time for our passions by ignoring, minimizing, or outsourcing the things that we don’t like as much. Two of the leading contenders would be housework and television. Yup, she went there. I looked into outsourcing our laundry, a popular choice, when we moved from a one-bedroom to a studio in our apartment complex. Our old apartment had a washer and dryer, and the new one does not. It turns out that the local laundry service has a thirty-pound minimum. Imagine sleeping within fifteen feet of a 28-pound pile of sweaty gym clothes. I don’t mind hauling our laundry to the laundry room twice a week. I do, on the other hand, outsource DRIVING because I hate it. Nothing makes me feel as relaxed as calling a ride share instead of having to fight traffic. We save $700 a month by not owning a vehicle, and that’s enough to outsource quite a lot of things. Personally, if I had more money I would spend it on shiatsu massage rather than a maid, because I can’t rub my own back and I don’t care about the forty minutes a week I spend cleaning house. This is also because I have a good idea of what I love to do versus what I find annoying. And that’s because I’ve had the good sense to read all of Laura Vanderkam’s books. That’s what I call time well spent. Favorite quotes: ...happy people are more productive and successful than unhappy people. It is possible to ratchet up your career while investing in other parts of your life as well. What would the next level look like for you? Picture it as vividly as possible. We don’t spend much time thinking about what we’d like to do with our free time, even though no one would take a 30-hour-per-week job without clarifying the job description. Use bits of time for bits of joy Cal Newport is back to help us think clearly. It’s no surprise that the author of the incredible and essential Deep Work would bring us a thoughtful, well-researched book like Digital Minimalism. Let’s pause a moment and consider whether our use of electronic devices and social media is intentional.
Newport makes a compelling case that our digital lives have become pervasive without our really realizing it. We never planned to be checking our phones so often; it just happened. Further, this unintentional creeping was deliberately designed by tech companies. They manipulate our attention, using intermittent rewards to keep us hooked and using their products as many minutes a day as possible. What should we do? We should protect how we spend our time. We should make those decisions based on our deepest personal values and the activities we enjoy the most. Digital minimalism is making sure that our social media use, streaming content, gaming, and other uses of our time provide massive value. It’s also making sure that our digital lives aren’t completely crowding out delights like playing music or visiting friends face-to-face. There’s a “new economics” that shifts the unit of measure of value from money to time. Many of us feel that we don’t have enough time, no matter how much money we have. Minimalism is a way of reclaiming our time from cultural default activities and rededicating it to people and activities that are truly important to us. Newport cites the financial independence community and Mr. Money Mustache as examples. Intention over convenience is the goal. Are we actually choosing how we spend our time, and are we respecting our own priorities? Hacks are insufficient for reining in digital consumption, though people have tried. Newport advises a detox, a thirty-day digital declutter, during which we can rediscover all the things we love to do but forgot about, because we always have our phones in our hands. We can then gradually reintroduce digital content, remembering that permanent transformation is what we need to get our lives back. Other people have done it and we can use their example. Digital Minimalism has many examples of digital minimalists who started painting and reading again, among other things. We can use the internet in service of a “leisure renaissance,” learning to do new things, connect with people who share our interests, and find out about events and activities. Digital Minimalism offers a Seasonal Leisure Plan, which can be built either around the academic calendar, quarterly business cycles, or anything else that the individual prefers. Newport also has a plan for Slow Media, a good idea for news junkies like me. We can continue to engage in social media, though most people can get their needs met in 20-40 minutes of use per week! This is a provocative and interesting book. I read it after realizing that I had been filling far too much time reading news articles, and making the resolution to be more aware of my news consumption. I decided that the easiest way to deal with this was to focus on reading full-length books instead, like I’ve done most of my life, and using my devices to support that. It has been wonderful! Why read a bunch of clickbait instead of novels and fascinating books like Digital Minimalism? Now that warm weather is coming, I’m going to sit myself down and think about all the fun things there are to do outdoors, with my phone zipped into my pocket. Favorite quotes: For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds. As I’ve learned by interacting with my readers, many have come to accept a background hum of low-grade anxiety that permeates their daily lives. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the more someone used social media, the more likely they were to be lonely. Here’s my suggestion: schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure. Gretchen Rubin comes through my part of the world fairly often, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go to a few of her readings and meet her. First of all, SHE IS SO NICE. The other thing that stands out, after her talk on Outer Order, Inner Calm, is how much the audience responds to this material. I’ve always thought she has delightfully subversive things to say about happiness and human behavior. It’s what she has to say about order and clutter that really seems to click with people the most.
When Gretchen asked how many people in the room make their bed every morning, nearly every hand went up. In fact I’m pretty sure they all did; I’m just hedging. Where else would this be true? Then she asked how many people make their bed even when they stay in a hotel, and everyone laughed because only a few hands went up. (Including mine!) I do it because it helps me make sure I haven’t lost anything in the bedding, like clothes, an eye mask, a pen, or my AirPods. Making the bed is part of my five-minute “perimeter check,” the way I’ve finally stopped losing objects when I travel. For me, outer order is about mental bandwidth, not so much calmness as simply being able to think straight and remember what I’m doing. When the bed is made, I don’t need to worry about it. When my desk is clear, I don’t need to worry about it. When the counters are clear, I don’t need to worry about them. In a split second, I can glance around and know, there is nothing I need to do here. Now I can focus. It does make relationships calmer. My husband prefers outer order as well, although for different reasons. I honestly believe he could concentrate on his work in the midst of a tornado or a kindergarten. For Upholders like him, an orderly environment just makes sense. There are no reasons to have things any other way. This is very helpful for me, because I work at home and I don’t need either the mess or the inevitable discussions about the mess! I started reading this book on the bus on the way home from the Outer Order, Inner Calm event, and I hadn’t even finished it before I had cleared and reorganized an area. I live in a studio apartment with another human, a dog, and a parrot, and even though we own relatively few things, almost all our stuff is on open display at all times. Clearing even one square foot makes a noticeable difference. Not everyone feels it as quickly, though, when most people are used to living in a larger home with more things around them. Here are some of the ideas that stood out to me: “Use a photograph to evaluate clutter.” This definitely works. I do photo evaluations with clients all the time. Choose a “flavor of the month.” Focus on sorting through only one category of object for a month. I need to do this again with my books. How about you? Assign each day its own task. This also works well for me, since I keep a slightly different schedule every day of the week. I also combine errands because I don’t have a car. Is your clutter backward-looking or forward-looking? How great a question is this? In my experience, almost all of my chronically disorganized clients are forward-looking types, who let old things go easily but hang on tightly to things like unused craft supplies and unread books. The holiday rule: Something you want, something you need, something to wear, and something to read. Yes, please! Huge gift explosions at holidays have never made much sense to me. If this happens several times a year, where the heck does it all go?? This book is designed to be read in bursts. The sections are short and punchy. You can read a single page and find yourself jumping up to clear an area. As an organizer and someone who has been reviewing organizing books for years, I still found fresh insights and material that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Especially for Gretchen Rubin fans, Outer Order, Inner Calm is the perfect book to keep beside you as you start spring cleaning! Favorite quotes: We want to cherish our possessions and we also want to feel free of them. Working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination. What would you accomplish with a magic task - a task that got completed overnight with no work from you? Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started. This is the book for those who haven’t gotten very far with clearing clutter by focusing on one item at a time. Joshua Becker offers a better way with The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life. Focus on the space and how you use it, not the items that are in it. Having lived this process, Becker shares how minimalism can change your relationships, your emotions, and ultimately your entire life.
Clutter causes a lot of problems that we might not realize until we start thinking about it. Resentment is the biggest one. We think of our own stuff as “valuable” and that of our housemates (partners, kids) as “clutter” and “junk.” Everything would be fine if only I had the entire house to store MY stuff! YOUR mess is messing everything up! Becker points out that minimalism is not only easier to keep neat, it also saves time and money. What else do people quarrel over if not those three areas? The best reason to consider this process is the “minimalism dividend.” Refocus your time, space, energy, and finances around the way you want to live your life. If you feel like you don’t have “enough” (time, money, space) to adopt a child, relocate, go back to school, train for a marathon, or whatever else is your dream, why is that? Becker offers examples of readers who have transformed their lives even under serious constraints, like illness or having seven kids. He also shares that he and his wife started a charitable foundation after they became minimalists. The hands-on chapters are very practical, clear, and specific, with checklists for each room. There is a method for setting goals, working with other household members, and moving from one room to another. Becker suggests starting with the living room because that’s the area where most people spend the most time, and it’s the first place that guests see. Household members should clear their own personal areas, and may take the initiative after seeing how well it’s going in the rest of the house. The Minimalist Home draws attention to how we use rooms and how they make us feel. Hospitality is one characteristic on the list. Do guests feel welcome when they visit? Do we ourselves feel welcome in our own homes? I always think of that common saying, found on so many fridge magnets, signs, and pillows: “Sorry for the mess but we live here.” Um, did you want me to come back another time? Or we could meet at the park? Whatever we feel when we’re at home, “defensive” or “resentful” hopefully don’t come up too often. Becker cites research, statistics, and reader feedback to back up his points about minimalism. For instance, hoarders have worse sleep, and the more cluttered their homes, the more likely they are to have a sleep disorder. (My parasomnia disorder is a major reason I moved toward minimalism, because it’s so dangerous to have stuff in the way when I sleepwalk). The average large kitchen typically has over a thousand individual items, and even a small one has over six hundred, which is hard to believe until you actually try to count up all the utensils in a single drawer. Sometimes a single data point can help to put things in perspective, reminding us that we are part of an era and that our stuff problems are shared, cultural problems. One of the benefits of minimalism is being able to pay off debt and save money toward other goals. My husband and I did this a few years ago, and we agree with Becker that minimalism makes it possible to move to a smaller, yet nicer, home. We’re in one-quarter of the space we had as newlyweds, we saved 48% of our net income last year, and we travel all the time. We look forward to discussing our finances because we’re almost always doing better than we had planned. It helps us to feel closer to each other. We could expand back into a larger home with more stuff anytime, but why would we, when it would just mean less vacation money and more time doing housework? Don’t focus on holding up one item at a time and asking how it fits into your life. Pull back and look at your home, your daily life, your relationships with everyone in your household, your finances, and whether you are all living your dreams. Not this shirt, but whether your wardrobe makes you feel fabulous. Not that book, but whether you feel rested and that you have plenty of time to do everything you want to do. Not this cute little decoration, but how you and your partner feel about your finances. Not that kitchen canister, but whether your social life is working for you. Why focus on one consumer item at a time when every other part of your life is more valuable? Favorite quotes: Give yourself the house you’ve always wished you had. You’ve already got it! It’s hidden underneath all your stuff. Not every possession is a belonging. One underappreciated benefit of minimalism is the ability to walk confidently through your bedroom with the lights off. Think less about who you were. Focus more on who you are becoming. I found this book originally under the title The YOLO Budget. Jason Vitug reminds us that living a life of meaning and purpose involves money. This perspective might help to make financial education more appealing, especially for Millennials, whose economic reality is different than that of previous generations. What’s true for them is true for all of us: We’ve lived through the financial meltdown of 2008, we need to plan further in advance for longer lifespans and longer retirements, we’re overwhelmed with information overload, and we’re learning that experiences are more fulfilling than material things. It’s time to adjust our attitude toward money.
Why aren’t people able to apply simple financial advice to their own lives? It starts with awareness. Vitug gives the example of a man who claimed to check his bank balance every day, yet believed, incorrectly, that he wasn’t paying any fees on his account. Another man claimed that he knew exactly where his money was going, but admitted that he didn’t actually track his expenses. Another said he was “on a budget” but turned out not to have one in place. Specific terminology can mask vagueness. It’s possible to have a high degree of certainty without it being based on reality. This can be amplified by being organized, in the sense of paying bills online, checking account balances, and other activities without any real strategy behind the efficiency. Why don’t people like budgets? Vitug says they can be reminders of past mistakes, that they can reveal there isn’t enough money for current spending habits, and that ultimately people feel that they aren’t necessary. I would have guessed (based on my own life) that the main reasons might be feeling too busy, not being all that great at math, and feeling annoyed at the “preachy” aspects that make budgeting feel similar to dieting. The difference is that Vitug actually traveled around and talked to people about their emotional connections with money, so his work is based on data, not guesswork or intuition. Vitug saved $35,000 and took two years off to backpack around the world. The realizations and habit changes that paid for his trip are what inspired him to try to help others fund their own dreams. A big part of this comes from challenging people’s perceptions of their situation and whether they are really fulfilled by their choices. We can make emotional choices that make us happier when we are more aware of what it is that we really want. After all, You Only Live Once, and if you do it right, once is enough. Here are some key questions from the many in the book:
Favorite quote: We should prioritize spending on things that contribute to our quality of life and help us progress toward our goals. Your Creative Work Space is a magnetically attractive book. Desha Peacock showcases dozens of women and the places they have designed for the intersection of their art and work. The book is a captivating mixture of style and philosophy. Profiles of anything from workshop spaces and boutiques to children’s playrooms and home offices, and even a tiny desk in a closet, include advice from their designers on how to make time and space for it all.
I work with chronic disorganization and hoarding. Scarcity mindset is universal among my people, and they believe they Can’t Afford things. A room with one hundred items that cost $1 is a room where $100 was spent. If that room also has twenty $5 items and ten $10 items, then that was $300 that could have gone toward a piece of statement furniture! I’m constantly trying to encourage everyone to think of the SPACE, not the stuff, and the ACTIVITY, not the supplies. This is why we need books like Your Creative Work Space, so we have some images of what that looks like. That’s why my favorite example from Your Creative Work Space is that of Stacey Blake. She has a desk in a former closet that “was being used to store items I was hoarding.” She got rid of all the stuff, had the shelves removed, and had a sheet of wood installed to use as a desk. This is a direct, tangible example of how to magically transform your clutter into a delicious art station. Wait until you see it! Your Creative Work Space has practical tips and plenty of photographic examples on how to deal with paper clutter, cord clutter, children’s artwork, hiding ugly electronics, and storing supplies. One particularly useful sample is a family control center for consolidating mail, bills, the family calendar, and office supplies. Don’t be discouraged, says Peacock, if the space you have right now doesn’t look like the gorgeous interiors in the book. If it’s something you want as part of your life, put it on your list as something to work toward. All of these creative work spaces began as a figment of someone’s imagination, so why should it be any different for you? Favorite quotes: What would [work] be like if instead of dreading it, you ached for it? What if, instead of feeling depleted, you felt energized by it? What if you could not wait to get to it? The two most important factors to opening up channels for your creative work to flow through you are your mental space and your physical space. “Perfection is boring, let’s get weird.” “I always love to remind folks that creative expression, doing what you love, and creating meaning in your life are all things that you deserve.” Make Anything Happen. Isn’t that the best name for a book? Carrie Lindsey has made the perfect introduction to vision boards. It’s so approachable and attractive that it’s inspiring even to people like me who are not visual artists.
Vision boards are more than just a fun craft. First comes the vision, and that includes goal-setting. One of the strengths of Make Anything Happen is the clarity it brings to choosing goals, planning, and scheduling. My own annual goal-setting process takes a month and results in something like a six-page document. Carrie Lindsey’s approach is so simple, yet exuberant in comparison! This is as much of a lifestyle book as it is an art book. It’s very personal and approachable, and gives the sense of how Lindsey fits her home-based business into her buzzing family life. She has advice for everything from how to deal with distraction and feeling stuck, to how to work around kids and their chaos. Note: don’t fold your kids’ socks for them when you could be making art! Make Anything Happen includes some well-designed planner pages, like Goal Trackers and Vision Board templates. It teaches how to make art journals with multiple vision boards. There are plenty of examples for inspiration. I’ve already made my first vision board. Let’s imagine lots more! Favorite quotes: “Whenever I don’t know where to start, I start with cleaning my desk.” “...there’s nothing magic about hard work.” An Audience of One is a very intriguing book about the artistic process. Srinivas Rao clearly dwells in the other realms. There are plenty of inspirational books in the world on creativity. This one speaks with assurance on the untapped wellspring.
For those of us who do a lot of public-facing work, there can be a tendency to develop a sense of obligation and turn our output into a chore. Rao says this focus on external outcomes (such as profit) can make the work boring. We return to our involvement in the process when we let go of attempting to control the outcome. One way of doing this is to make something purely for ourselves, to remember why we first fell in love with this particular form. A focus of An Audience of One is on people who do something creative only for themselves. No readers, no viewers, no customers, no followers or commenters, imagine! These examples of devoted creatives have a way of elevating more activities to the level of “art.” Maybe a home cook is more talented than a professional chef; how would anyone know? On the one hand, this perspective should give courage to novices. Art is good for you! What you do matters! It’s fine to do it for yourself and nobody else! Rao cites something a lot of readers will want to know more about, which is Mindfulness Based Art Therapy. Apparently making art has measurable, positive health effects on everything from heart rate and blood pressure to cortisol levels and bodily pain. On the other hand, the perspective that we should make our own art for ourselves alone, that’s a potent idea. What if we took it all the way? What if we really made every single last thing that’s been swimming in our fountains? What if we never held back, what if it all came out and kept coming out? What if we? Swam out full fathom? These are the parts of An Audience of One that compelled me the most. Rituals, power questions, activation energy. Identifying and eliminating your tolerations. Dream work. Setting intentions before sleep. Wow! Some of these chapters maybe could be full-length books in their own right. I loved An Audience of One. It pushed my barriers and made me feel that I can and should be doing more with my work. It reminded me that there is more potential in my craft and my process. Rao mentions having three books that you refer to at least once a month, and this may become one of mine. Favorite quotes: When we focus on end results, we essentially defeat one of the main benefits of creative work: to derive joy from the work itself. The work itself defeats resistance. It’s rare for anybody to proudly state that they did “nothing.” |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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