Things
So much of our lives & thoughts are expressed by the things with which we surround ourselves. Here are some thought-provoking perspectives on the things in our spaces.
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Authenticity, Freedom and LESS
The Year of Less – How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy In a Store by Cait Flanders. Cait Flanders writes a blog called CaitFlanders.com. Several years ago, she embarked on a year-long experiment to NOT purchase anything that was not consumable or not needed (or not related to her dream of travel) and documented her journey on her blog. The book about her year of un-consumerism takes her experiences and adds in some background information and post-experiment discoveries that she didn’t write about in her blog. It’s a fascinating read by an interesting and likable author. Her…
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Old Money and New Blood
The Old Money Book by Byron Tully. Humorous, tongue-in-cheek but VERY spot-on advice for thinking about money and our relationship with it. I had the mental image of a visiting great-uncle (looking eerily like an older Winston Churchill) sitting back in a wing-back leather chair in an old English country estate library. In between puffs on his cigar, he acerbically mutters little gems of great financial management advice to the “younger niece or nephew” (us, the reader.) One of the best pieces of advice is that there is quite a difference between “appearance of wealth” and “reality of wealth”. We’ve all heard the idea expressed before – but it is…
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Clothes & What They Express About Our Thoughts
You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal About You by Jennifer Baumgartner. An eye opening perspective on how our closets can be the true mirrors of our psyche. The author has a friendly and warm tone of voice. She describes different women (and one man) and how their stages of life and their closets were intertwined – both the literal (these are the clothes that the people wore every day) and the mental/emotional – the clothes represented how the people saw themselves and their lives. I finished the book and then looked at my own closet with a different (and clearer) perspective.