Book reviews!
Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks
This book explains how to have a happy, healthy relationship with yourself and others. The authors explain that co-dependency is bad, but co-commitment (a word they just made up) is good. People in a codependent relationship limit each other’s potential by helping them stay stuck in an unhealthy habit. People in a co-committed relationship help each other grow.
The authors are therapists and give a lot of examples from their practice. We carry our emotions in our bodies. A healthy individual fully feels the emotion and then lets it pass on through. When you interrupt the emotion before it’s done…emoting, it builds up in other ways. Like tension in your jaw.
I don’t know. I didn’t do any of the exercises at the end so maybe that’s why I found this book a little too wishy-washy.
This bit on self-love, especially that last sentence, gave me pause.
We set impossibly high goals and feel bad most of the time because we have not met them. Love becomes a reward, something we give ourselves only if we have done well. True self-love is not conditional. It is there whether we are being good or bad, strong or weak, performing up to par or falling on our faces. In order to love ourselves, we need to learn to separate our selves from our actions.
Maybe there’s a difference between loving yourself and liking yourself? As in, you should love yourself even if you’re a serial killer because…we’re all part of one energy and that energy is, on the whole positive? Or something? But maybe you shouldn’t like yourself because you kill people?
I don’t know.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollen
Michael Pollen coined the excellent phrase that I conjure in my head weekly. Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.
I wrote another post on this book already, but here’s a quote I liked, but didn’t use in my article.
Self-reflection can lead to great intellectual and artistic achievement but also to destructive forms of self-regard and many types of unhappiness. (In an often-cited paper titled “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,” psychologists identified a strong correlation between unhappiness and time spent in mind wandering…)
Spend less time in your head wandering and more time paying attention to the world and you’ll be less unhappy. Mindfulness and meditation are my takeaways.
I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam
The author solicits and then analyzes time logs from women making six figures of income and who also had small children at home to take care. She combs through the data and gives advice on how to fit more life in. Think of time in weekly increments instead of daily. It’s okay if you don’t get family time in today, as long as you get it in this week.
I stopped reading about 100 pages in. This book was not written for me. She wrote it for people with busy lives and aspirations.
The Joy of Doing Just Enough: The Secret Art of Being Lazy and Getting Away with It by Jennifer McCartney
This is a quick twenty minute read before bed that made me laugh out loud three times. I don’t know that I would follow her advice, but I don’t think you’re supposed to. The more accurate category for her book is humor and not self-help.
But I am going to take her word that I don’t have to wash my fruit with a special fruit wash. That had been something I’d been wondering about.
The Art of the Good Life: 52 Surprising Shortcuts to Happiness, Wealth, and Success by Rolf Dobelli
I loved this book and I want to buy it and make pen marks in it one day. That is the highest praise I know to give. The author wrote The Art of Thinking Clearly, which is also really good. He gives a set of guidelines on things to avoid if you want to live a good life. He brings in wisdom from Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger, stoicism, and psychology. An excellent trio of sources.
The good life is one of tranquility, equanimity, serenity, peace of mind, composure. I could give you more synonyms. Imperturbable. Chill. This is exactly what I want in life. His guidelines include gems like negative visualizations and avoiding self-pity, complaining, and self-deception.
He also gave me permission to quit social media as it invites envy and wastes time.
And this, of course,
There’s nothing more idiotic than slogging away at a job that earns you lots of money but brings you no joy — especially if you’re investing that money in items rather than experiences.
And
The greatest challenge of success is keeping quiet about it, as they say.
Stalking God: My Unorthodox Search for Something to Believe In by Anjali Kumar
Memoir about one woman’s search for answers on god. I couldn’t find the groove with her narrative voice and put it down after fifty pages. The previous book told me that the Good Life means not wasting time on books that don’t thrill me. Rereading good books is better than reading new not great books. This feels a little freeing.
I just heard Laura Vanderkam on the Paula Pant podcast and she made some really excellent points about time management. Definitely getting that one
She also has a blog that I enjoy.
Here’s something from one of her recent posts I really liked:
While researching Off the Clock, I came across a fascinating insight from Alan Burdick. He wrote: “Very often when we remark, ‘How did time fly by so quickly?’ what’s actually meant is some version of ‘I don’t remember where the time went.’”
Time perception turns out to be all about memory. The more memory units we have from any span of time, the longer it appears to be. That’s why the first day of a vacation somewhere exotic seems so long. Your brain has no idea what it needs to know in the future, so it’s remembering all of it. All these memories make the time expand.
The opposite is also true. When time isn’t memorable we don’t remember it. When too much sameness stacks up, whole years can disappear into memory sinkholes. We have no answer to the question “why is today different from other days?” and so the day is forgotten.
Thank you for the report on the books that you put down. I think the worse possible book one can ever encounter is one that’s not obviously worthless. It lures one in. Over the course of the work a vague sense of its dis-value increases until the last page when it’s done and one thinks, “that was a waste.”
A better book may be written much more poorly, but its ideas call to mind other ideas. And that creates value by bringing to mind the other ideas. Ferinstance, the first book you cited this time calls to mind Steven Covey’s book “Principle Centered Leadership” wherein he describes a maturity model of dependence => independence.
When people/organizations get together they might both be dependent, but their respective incompetence compliments one another to yield a co-dependent relationship. (Bad.) One must first develop with oneself the capabilities of independence, then team with other independent people. When this teaming matches complimentary strengths, you get an inter-dependent relationship. (Better.) If one partner gets sick or is unavailable, the weaker partner is competent to get things done temporarily.
One irony of selecting a financial advisor is that one must have specialized financial knowledge to judge an advisor’s competence. Mr. Covey would suggest we learn enough to competently take the measure of such people, then put them to work. At a personal level, this means that both spouses must be able to balance a check book, cook a meal, mend a fuse, and change a diaper.
Thanks for the book suggestion
You’re amazing
Thanks for the reminder. 🙂
Having a hard time being mindful and meditative without being in my head. Can someone explain how to do that?
I’m writing a lot on meditation at the moment, but here’s a quick answer to your question: I think meditation is about showing curiosity about what’s in your head. The goal is not necessarily to empty your mind. If you do manage to do that for an extended period of time, you simply notice that fact curiously and watch it go by. That too shall pass. Meditating is to help you realize that everything changes and everything is impermanent. Get comfortable with change.
I enjoyed your book reviews! I may have to pick up that last one – it sounds good.
Cathy!
Thanks I grabbed the art of thinking clearly. Have you read any other books on psycadelics yet?
Nope.
“Rereading good books is better than reading new not great books.” I need to adopt this mantra. It’s always so tempting to seek out a new favorite, when there are so many great books I’ve read and loved and could enjoy again.
How many times have I come home from the library with a bunch of books, but when I’m in the mood to read, I’m not in the mood to read any of the books I have! I think that’s when rereading would be a good idea. Have an old favorite on hand.
“Imperturbable” – a word I came across once, only once. From Robert Ringer, author of Looking Out For #1 and other bestsellers. You may like to check out his writings.
Robert (not Ringer)
Singapore
I have to admit that the thesaurus gave me imperturbable. Thanks for the author recommendation.
Started reading The Art of the Good Life. I like his matter-of-fact tone, calmly advising about how we can improve our lives through algorithms.
Just one quibble: he says he doesn’t worry about parking tickets any more because he takes it out of his budget marked for charity. It’s a shame that saving the whales might take a back seat if he gets too many tickets. How about making it part of his car budget, period?
That part didn’t bother me. He seems like he’s probably pretty responsible and doesn’t accumulate parking tickets.