bluetree/wisdom

Chapter One
Rituals

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition,
the end to which every enterprise and tlabour tends...

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, November 10, 1750

Creating daily rituals-making daily tasks into times of enrichment through planning and special personal details-is a way to live a richer, more satisfying life. It may seem an obvious point-yet it is so easy to do! But in my work as an interior designer, I have found that many people need advice about redesigning the small details of everyday living: they need this much more than they need advice about how to design a brandnew living room.

Samuel Johnson is a hero of mine. His life was not an easy journey, yet he lived day by day with a sense of urgency, reverence and passion. "The process," he insisted, "I's the reality." As I've worked in the decorative arts over these past twenty-five years, I've become convinced that only by paying careful attention to the simple details of daily tasks and to our immediate surroundings can we live vitally and beautifully all the days of our lives. It takes a commitment to enjoy each day fully. And it takes respect for the significance of grace.

" Rituals" is my term for patterns you create in your everyday living that uplift the way you do ordinary things, so that a simple task rises to the level of something special, ceremonial, ritualistic.Rituals can elevate the way you feel about yourself, your life, and make you more peaceful and more free, more useful to others.

The difference between feeling bored and feeling alive, I believe, lies in astimulating daily life that is elevated into a fuller experience through pleasing details.

When these small moments are handled lovingly and with thought and care, they become life-enhancing and make you capable of doing more with the rest of your time.

I've observed inmy communications with people all over the world the tendency so many of us have to concentrate our energies on things that are for special occasions rather than on things we do, or use, every day. In design terms, this translates into working to get the living room just right, instead of concentrating on the rooms we spend the most time in, day after day-the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. This 5-percent rule translates into a tendency to save up a sense of the special for a few outstanding events each year-for a particular party, anniversary or birthday celebration, a vacation. Such events comprise at the most 5 percent of our living time, and the remaining 95 percent is often merely walked through, in wistful anticipation of some later Joy. But what we all really want to do, I think, is live in the present, really enjoy every day, not put our lives on hold for that special 5 percent. We want to enjoy all the days of our lives, and especially the time spent in the sanctuary of home. Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Instead of rushing through our lives to get somewhere-instead of saving up real living for later--I think it's important to remember that each single day is all we have. Single days experienced fully add up to a lifetime lived deeply and well. Today is your life-not yesterday and not tomorrow. If we have tomorrow, it will be a gift, but what we do today, right now, will have an accumulated effect on all our tomorrows. If we make short shrift of our day-to-day lives, even if we live to experience "later," I don't believe we will know fully how to appreciate what we have. Living well is a habit, and rituals improve and reinforce good life habits.

That nimble writer of aphorisms Logan Pearsall Smith, in his book All Trivi,said: "There are two things to aim at in life: first,to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest ofmankind achieve the

With her 25th book, lifestyle philosopher Alexandra Stoddard offers simple steps for taking charge of your life--your way. In brief essays filled with useful examples and optimism, she reveals 50 choices you can make to live joyfully in pursuit of what is true, good, and beautiful. Her essays help us trust ourselves ("Intuition is your guiding light"), stay steady in a storm ("Your choices count most in a crisis"), embrace the new ("Accept opportunity"), address unfinished business ("Have as few regrets as possible"), surround ourselves with delights ("Redefine what is beautiful"), and remember to have fun ("Cheap thrills are thrilling").

As a pioneering writer and lecturer on personal happiness for the past twenty years, Alexandra has inspired millions to break the "rules" and pursue fulfillment. Now, as scientists have begun to discover the benefits of living a happy life, Alexandra provides practical ways to live happily every day. She puts us in charge of our choices, reminding us that we always have a choice about what we think, feel, and do. When we are true to ourselves, we can fly above stress and conflict, contented and confident that we are the right path.

Every choice you make is an opportunity to delight in life. You Are Your Choices offers insight and companionship each step of the way.
Deborah Bigelow - Library Journal

Stoddard's (Living a Beautiful Life) guide, which invites readers to live a good, beautiful, and true life, fits right in with people's desire to live life differently in the new year. In 50 short essays, Stoddard incorporates the thoughts of great philosophers and leaders into commonsense ideas for daily application. She invites readers to embrace variety, e.g., by tasting a new flavor of ice cream or learning to identify constellations. Similarly, she encourages the celebration of simple rituals by using a special bar of soap or a beautiful towel for hand washing. Everyone will undoubtedly find something of value in this gem of a book for most public libraries.

'hikmet bahcesi'/'garden of wisdom': turkish blog on islam, sufism, wisdom...

He is not a lover who does not love forever.
Euripides

It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.
Kahlil Gibran

At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.
Jean De La Bruyere

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
Martin Luther King Jr.

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Lord Alfred Tennyson

It is said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it.
Miguel De Cervantes

A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved, by others.
Anonymous

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
Mahatma Gandhi

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
W. H. Auden

A good marriage winds up as a meeting of minds, which had better be pretty good to start with.
Anonymous

A heart that loves is always young.
Greek Proverb

A life without love in it is like a heap of ashes upon a deserted hearth, with the fire dead, the laughter stilled and the light extinguished.
Frank Tebbets

A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.
Michael Garrett Marino

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.
Charles Dickens

A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears.
Woodrow Wyatt


A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self in the mirror of some woman's eyes.
Clare Boothe Luce

A man in love is like a clipped coupon -- it's time to cash in.
Mae West


A man in love mistakes a pimple for a dimple.
Japanese Proverb

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
George Moore

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
William Butler Yeats

A proof that experience is of no use, is that the end of one love does not prevent us from beginning another.
Paul Bourget

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.
George Eliot

A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce

A woman who could always love would never grow old; and the love of mother and wife would often give or preserve many charms if it were not too often combined with parental and conjugal anger. There remains in the face of women who are naturally serene and peaceful, and of those rendered so by religion, an after-spring, and later an after-summer, the reflex of their most beautiful bloom.
Jean Paul Richter

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