IDEAS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
— Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”
— Karen Lamb
THE GIFT OF FRUGALITY
In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea, retired film director Charles Arrowby had an epiphany. He immediately left his life in the city, and purchased a remote house by the sea. Arrowby wanted to live simply, with few possessions and distractions and to learn to cook simply, just enough food to keep the body healthy. “Inspired simplicity,” he notes, “is the essence of good eating.”
“When I was young,” Arrowby declares in the novel, “I was idiotic and conventional enough to think that I had to entertain people at well-known restaurants. It gradually became clear to me that guzzling large quantities of expensive, pretentious, often mediocre food in public places was not only immoral, unhealthy, and unaesthetic, but also unpleasurable.”
Like many thinkers before him, Arrowby had stumbled upon the ideology of simple living. Greek philosopher Epicurus, too, fled from city chaos in Athens to pursue a life of quiet simplicity and reflection with friends, establishing “The Garden”, most likely one of the first philosophical communes in the world. The group of retreating philosophers kept to a diet of bread, olives, and water, and occasionally cheese.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
“Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn her back on life.”
MARY ENGELBREIT
“If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.”
