Book Review – Simplify Your Life

I recently read Simplify Your Life, by Woodeene Koenig-Bricker.  As you may know, I’ve been making a dedicated effort to bring more simplicity, peace, and focus into our family life – and this book came at the perfect time!  (Remember how I was going to write several posts about my efforts to simplify?  They are still up and coming, it’s just that I was thrown off a bit by the fact that apparently simplifying means spending less time on the computer.  Huh.  Who knew?)

It’s a quick read, in fact it’s marketed as part of a “30-Minute Read” series.  There are a lot of relevant quotes scattered throughout the book, and I really enjoyed reading them.  Quotes like this one:

“Our Life is frittered away by detail.  Simplify, simplify, simplify!  I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.”

                                                                             -Henry David Thoreau

Or this one:

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

                                                                           -Hans Hoffman

This little book (only63 pages) gives sound advice on the following areas:

• Cutting down on clutter
• Simplifying relationships
• Nurturing our minds, bodies, and spirits
• Simplifying the way we live as we learn to use our resources wisely and treat our environment with more care
• How growth in gratitude will help us live more simply as we focus on our blessings and stop wasting time and energy to gain what we do not have.

Much of what I read was plain common sense, but there were new ways of viewing areas of my life that I appreciated, and I really enjoyed this book!

One more quote:

“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities.  It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend…. When we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present – love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure – the wasteland of illusion falls away, and we experience Heaven on earth.”

                                                                - Sarah Ban Breathnach

Thank you to The Catholic Company for providing me with a complimentary copy of this book to review.