Food

"By the time you have reached your fortith birthday, you will have eaten about 50,000 meals and spent over 50,000 hours in a food-related atmosphere! We have to eat to live, so why not make it one of the simplest pleasures in life - beautiful and memorable as well as delicious? I believe the quality of the food we treat ourselves to and the elegance of the food ritual sends out a signal about how important we think we are, a signal to our inner selves and to others." - Alexandra Stoddard. "Living a Beautiful Life."

This is great advice. The trouble is, more and more of us are living alone and have somehow come to believe that unless we're eating with someone else, caring about elegance is self-indulgent or just plain nuts. More and more of us are way, way too busy (we think) to care this much about what and how we eat. I think that's wrong. If we want to have the life of our dreams, a great place to start is by treating ourselves like we're worth having it - especially in the areas where we spend the most time.

Alexandra has a whole chapter of suggestions. She begins with the kitchen - the environment most of us eat in on a regular basis. Here are some of her suggestions: 1) Take everything off the counters and determine whether you really need for those items to be sitting out. The more clear your kitchen is, the more beautiful it is. 2) The kitchen is a great place to grow plants and the plants add to the environment. Also, an indoor garden of herbs and flowers can really add beauty. 3) Now that modern ventilation keeps kitchens from becoming greasy, hanging art work on the walls is easy. These are pieces that you will look at every day, so they should be things that are ver special to you.

If you think this is crazy, why not just try a few things to see how it makes you feel. If they don't make you feel like you're living the life of your dreams, let it go. But I would be willing to be you will feel pretty special.