The School of Life Press strana 2 z 2

It is a daily undertaking - a morning shot of coffee, an absentminded sandwich at your desk, a hastily assembled dinner with the remnants from the fridge... With its every day ubiquity we can make the mistake of assuming that food is of little importance, or simply fuel to see us through the day. But what is its real impact on our emotional lives, and how can we better nourish ourselves? What we eat and how we eat it has a significant impact on our psychological well-being. In recent times, our society has been eager to recruit food to the project of physical health, but we've not always paid so much attention to how cooking and eating can assist us with our emotional health. With over 150 recipes, Thinking & Eating shows how ingredients and dishes can be supporters of certain ideas, emotions and states of mind that best help us confront the challenges of existence. In each recipe we discover of the ways in which food can store, memorialise and transmit the most important ideas of our lives.

Everyone tells kids that art matters - but the truth is that very often it's hard to know why it really does. Museum visits can feel like a chore as does having to learn the names of the big artists we're all meant to love (but perhaps don't quite in the way we're supposed to). This is a huge pity because - grasped the right way - art has a deep capacity to improve our lives and offer us a sense of joy and mental well-being. Here is a guide to art for children with a difference: in a tone that's kindly, informative, unstuffy and at times rightly irreverent, this book explains how art can fit into our lives. We learn where the impulse to make art comes from, what art to look at in certain moods, how to go around a museum without getting bored and why - without even realising it - we all become experts in art by decorating our first bedrooms. This is an innovative guide to the importance of art, produced in a way that will enchant children and, along the way, teach their favourite adults one or two vital things as well.

People who want to express admiration for culture often say it's valuable 'for its own sake'. The School of Life disagrees: culture is valuable because it is capable of addressing our needs for education, guidance, consolation, perspective, encouragement and correction. Although we pay reverence to culture, few have learnt how to use it systematically. Its value is in fact therapeutic. It can assist us to get better at managing the normal troubles of everyday life; like the tendency to get unhelpfully irritated with people we like, to lose perspective over minor matters, to lose sympathy with people who deserve our compassion and to take too harsh a view of our own mistakes. The School of Life believes that the world has, up to now, not properly made use of the huge therapeutic potential of culture. This groundbreaking book shows how to do so.

We don't think we hate cheap things, of course, but we rather behave as if we do, in the sense that we rarely properly appreciate what is always around us and doesn't appear to cost very much, for example, the night sky, pencils, fried eggs, zips and the holding of hands. This volume explores the way we can easily grow disenchanted with our immediate circumstances and pine for what is exotic, costly and out of reach - and it gently returns us to ourselves, full of new found wonder and gratitude. Combining literature, economics and sheer good sense, Why We Hate Cheap Things reawakens us to the world immediately around us and to the latent beauty and interest of what we have.

Alongside a satisfying relationship, a career we love is one of the foremost requirements for a fulfilled life. Unfortunately, it is devilishly hard to understand oneself well enough to know quite where one's energies should be directed. A Job To Love is designed to help us out of some of these impasses. It is a guide to how we can better understand ourselves and locate a job that is right for us. With compassion and a deeply practical spirit, this book guides us to discover our true talents and to make sense of our confused desires and aspirations before it is too late.

Many of us are quiet geniuses at the art of procrastination. We tend to feel so guilty about everything we haven't done yet (and the hours frittered away as though we were immortal), we never get around to reflecting on why we delay and how we might do so less o en. It seems as if we have procrastinated too much to deserve a new start. Far from it. As this book shows, procrastination isn't a weird affliction we alone have been cursed with: it's a fascinating and solvable design-flaw of the human animal. The goal is not to remove procrastination altogether (it sometime has things to teach us), but to understand its roots and plot a nimble path around it. This is a book about managing our procrastination, getting the most out of our afternoons on the sofa and then sometimes daring to get on with the most important tasks in our lives.

A guide to the art of failing well—with actionable tips and a gentle approach This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without failing – in small and usually also in large ways. Sometimes our failures are very obvious, at other times, we feel we have to conceal them out of shame. This book encourages us to accept the role that failure plays for all of us and to feel compassion for ourselves for the messes we can’t help but make as we go through our lives. Full of actionable tips on how to approach life's inevitable failures from small to large, this is the perfect volume for anyone who has ever gone through a breakup, suffered a career crisis, made enemies, fumbled a project, or wasted their time. (In other words: everyone.) There is nothing more human than failing—and nothing wiser and more necessary failing well. PRAGMATIC ADVICE ON how to be resilient and endure regret, so we can recover and move on from despair and catastrophe. WE ARE NOT ALONE explores various examples of real-world failure and reminds us that we are not alone in making mistakes. EMPATHETIC AND REAL written from the perspective of those who have failed and survived their failure. CHAPTERS INCLUDE How to Deal with the Meanness of the World, What Love Really Is and Why It Matters, Finding Perspective, Fear and Self-Hatred, and Self-Compassion.