Living a Beautiful Life: 500 Ways to Add Elegance, Order, Beauty and Joy to Every Day of Your Life

Eating. Sleeping. Bathing. Chores. These are the things we do every day yet few of us stop to consider how we perform the routines that occupy 95 percent of our lives: in chaos or serenity with irritation or with joy. Here in one elegant copious and forever rereadable book Alexandra Stoddard shows how to live a more beautiful more ordered life every single day. Drawing on the wisdom of Emerson Samuel Johnson Rilke and many others and warmed by Alexandra Stoddards personal anecdotes this book deals with life both philosophically and practically -- from discovering the sources of your well-being to buying the right stationery or sheets; from using solitude to replenish your spirit to using fabrics ribbon paper and your own five senses to transform your daily life. Living a Beautiful Life demonstrates how to use the ordinary in extraordinary ways suggesting hundreds of techniques for turning dull irritating routines into life-enhancing rituals; hundreds of simple ways to transform your days -- or your bedroom kitchen bathroom and desk -- into delights of beauty and efficiency. Theres a marvelous trick for locating the perfect psychological spot for your bed a quick way to use "remembrance of things past" to choose color schemes that suit you suggestions for how to turn a fifteen-minute lunch break into a restorative experience. And throughout Alexandra Stoddard shows how taking care of "the little things" can ultimately add up to a change in the big things. Most of all Living a Beautiful Life reveals how a beautiful life can be achieved; how daily motions become truly satisfying patterns of pleasure; and how these patterns of pleasure can add up to a life lived deeply and well transforming even the most cluttered and hectic existence.