Life Is Messy

Life is messy. It isn't a color-within-the-lines exercise. It's a wild and outrageous invitation full of uncertain outcomes. The mess of life is both inevitable and unexpected. It is filled with delightful mysteries and frustrating predicaments. In our disposable culture, we throw broken things away. So, what will we do with broken people, broken relationships, broken institutions, broken families, and of course, our very own broken selves? We are all broken and wounded. This book is about putting our lives back together, and allowing ourselves to be put back together, when life doesn't turn out as we expected it to. Based on his own heart-wrenching personal journals, Matthew Kelly shares how the worst three years of his life affected him, by exploring this question: Can someone who has been broken be healed and become more beautiful and more lovable than ever before? The answer will fill you with hope. There has never been a more urgent need for us to attend to what is happening within us. This is quite simply the right book at the right time.

Geneen Roth, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Women Food and God, explains how to take the journey to find one’s own best self in this “beautiful, funny, deeply relevant” (Glennon Doyle) collection of personal reflections. With an introduction by Anne Lamott, This Messy Magnificent Life is a personal and exhilarating read on freeing ourselves from daily anxiety, lack, and discontent. It’s a deep dive into what lies behind our self-criticism, whether it is about the size of our thighs, the expression of our thoughts, or the shape of our ambitions. And it’s about stopping the search to fix ourselves by realizing that on the other side of the “Me Project” is spaciousness, peace, and the capacity to reclaim one’s power and joy. This Messy Magnificent Life explores the personal beliefs, hidden traumas, and social pressures that shape not just women’s feelings about their bodies but also their confidence, choices, and relationships. After years of teaching retreats and workshops on weight, money, and other obsessions, Roth realized that there was a connection that held her students captive in their unhappiness. With laugh-out-loud humor, compassion, and dead-on insight she reveals the paradoxes in our beliefs and shows how to move beyond our past to build lives that reflect our singularity and inherent power. This Messy Magnificent Life is a brilliant, bravura meditation on who we take ourselves to be, what enough means in our gotta-get-more culture, and being at home in our minds and bodies.

A simple shift in thinking can change everything you believe about your own happiness. By the time we become adults, most of us have joined the religion of suffering, which preaches that unless circumstances are controlled, life will be a mess. We compare ourselves to others and speculate about an impossible-to-know future, holding out hope for an improved life through getting ahead, fulfilling passion, or finding true love. But the idea that happiness comes from putting effort toward altering one’s circumstances is harmful and backward. What if we instead learned to understand that circumstances can rarely be controlled, and that life is, and always will be, messy? From that starting point, we could learn to use our minds to create happiness despite life’s ever-changing circumstances and events. Life’s Messy, Live Happy by Cy Wakeman is about dramatically changing the level of happiness you feel in your daily life, by learning to disconnect happiness from external forces, stop worrying about the future, and realize that most of your negative feelings are about things that never even happened. Wakeman is a credible, relatable teacher—a business owner, mother, and community member who has lived her philosophy and achieved profound happiness and success in a crazy, messy life. Filled with concrete daily practices and true stories that are hilarious, painful, and poignant, this book will change everything: your perspective, your focus, and your energy level for everyday life.

"Readers will laugh out loud, cry, and commiserate with her every step of the way....The protagonist is a feisty, mixed-up, phenomenal delight." Kirkus Reviews "Shawna Railey has crafted a funny, sensitive, yet relatable narrative around her title character. Anyone who has experienced loss can understand Blue's attempts to come to terms with it. A strong debut novel that would be an excellent recommendation for any reader looking for books on loss and sibling relationships." Booklist "Railey's debut is a touching and humorous tale of family, loss, grief, and friendship." School Library Journal "A book for our times."-Betsy Bird for School Library Journal Eleven-year-old "Blue" Warren is cursed with three bothersome brothers, a too-busy father, a recently deceased mother, and she's annoyed. With humor, hijinks, and heart, this debut novel is a touching tale of grief and the healing power of family. Eleven-year-old Beulah "Blue" Warren spends every waking moment surrounded by boys: her three brothers, her father, her best friend, even the family dog, but that's never stopped her from being her usual rambunctious self. Grappling with the loss of her mother, Blue is determined to do what she wants without fear of consequences. When she is sent to the principal's office, she gets out of it like a pro. When the witchy neighbor next door trashes her yard, Blue doesn't just get even, she gets ahead. No clean underwear because she hasn't done the laundry? No worries. That's what her little brother's Superman underwear is for, isn't it? But everything changes on the day she explores the attic and finds her mother's death certificate. Blue will need to muster all the strength she has to deal with the truth, find forgiveness, trust in her father, and grieve for her mother once and for all.

The urge to tidiness seems to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Many of us feel threatened by anything that is vague, unplanned, scattered around or hard to describe. We find comfort in having a script to rely on, a system to follow, in being able to categorise and file away. We all benefit from tidy organisation - up to a point. A large library needs a reference system. Global trade needs the shipping container. Scientific collaboration needs measurement units. But the forces of tidiness have marched too far. Corporate middle managers and government bureaucrats have long tended to insist that everything must have a label, a number and a logical place in a logical system. Now that they are armed with computers and serial numbers, there is little to hold this tidy-mindedness in check. It's even spilling into our personal lives, as we corral our children into sanitised play areas or entrust our quest for love to the soulless algorithms of dating websites. Order is imposed when chaos would be more productive. Or if not chaos, then . . . messiness. The trouble with tidiness is that, in excess, it becomes rigid, fragile and sterile. In Messy, Tim Harford reveals how qualities we value more than ever - responsiveness, resilience and creativity - simply cannot be disentangled from the messy soil that produces them. This, then, is a book about the benefits of being messy: messy in our private lives; messy in the office, with piles of paper on the desk and unread spreadsheets; messy in the recording studio, the laboratory or in preparing for an important presentation; and messy in our approach to business, politics and economics, leaving things vague, diverse and uncomfortably made-up-on-the-spot. It's time to rediscover the benefits of a little mess.

Think minimalism means a perfectly curated, always tidy home? Think again. Drowning in tides of toys, overflowing closets, and a crazy schedule, Rachelle Crawford assumed you had to be naturally organized to keep a tidy living space. Then she found minimalism: the messy, real-life kind, that is less about perfection and more about purpose. Thus began a journey toward decluttering her home, calendar, and soul. With empathy, grace, and humor, Crawford--who curates the popular Abundant Life with Less site--shares doable ways to own less and live more fully. Laying out practical strategies for reducing waste, curbing consumption, decluttering, and finding lots more joy, Crawford offers no-nonsense solutions for the rest of us. Learn to become a more conscious consumer, create a capsule wardrobe, inspire family members to join you, free up more time for the things that matter, and create a tidy(ish) home. The messy minimalist way is a no-judgment zone, one in which we learn sustainable habits and grace-based practices. It's about living lightly on the earth and making room for purpose. Becoming a messy minimalist is not about turning into someone else; it's about clearing away clutter and expectations to unearth who you really are. It's about carrying fewer things so that we find ourselves holding onto what truly matters.

Do your family dinners happen in more than one language? Do you celebrate Christmas and Eid? Do you and your family feel at home in more than one country? If so, then you may be a MOLA Family and yes, this multicultural, multilingual, mobile life can get a little 'messy.' In South America, a mola is a shirt made from intricately stitched layers of patterns and cloth. Worn with pride, it represents who you are - inside and out. Mariam Ottimofiore presents a mola as the perfect metaphor for globally mobile families living between cultures, countries, languages, nationalities, identities and homes, who find their story hard to articulate. She has created the MOLA tool to help global families design and show their stories to the world. This is your 'life by design.' Pakistan-born Mariam is a writer, researcher and expatriate family specialist who grew up and lived in nine countries. Her husband is German/Italian and together they have raised their children in Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Raw, honest, inspiring and uplifting, This Messy Mobile Life comprises personal reflection, expert advice and survey research to help you take your global family from mess to mola.