Book Review: The Life Organizer
Tips, Stories & Prompts to Focus Your Needs & Navigate Your Dreams
Jennifer Louden, New World Library, 247 pages
Busy much? Overwhelmed, swamped, multi-tasking out of control? That’s me, far too much of the time. I’m always saying to myself, I’ve got to get control of my life! Trouble is, I’m too busy, overwhelmed, swamped, and multi-tasking out of control to have time to read a book to tell me how to get control of my life.
If you’re like me, this is the book for you.
Author Jennifer Louden starts this amazing book with these questions: “What if self-mercy and listening to your inner authentic desires were your truest guides, far more trustworthy than gauging how much you accomplish in a day or what you earn? What if feeling confusion and uncertainty was actually a sign that you were on the right path? What if you could erase your sense of never having enough time or energy by cultivating a constant loving connection to yourself?”
The Life Organizer is no run-of-the-mill self-help book. It’s not full of advice about how to make lists to get things done and it doesn’t guide you to be any different than you are. Instead, it guides you to allow yourself to be who you are, to embrace your life as imperfect and to connect with your true desires–and apply that to daily life choices, thus developing the faith to lead and shape a life you love. Louden calls this type of life organizing (versus rigid organizing systems) the difference between wearing a business suit and donning organic pajamas. Louden’s life organizing takes into account the true form and flow of women’s lives, what she calls “the difficult dance between what we want and what life requires of us,” and through it all, it is defined by self-kindness.
Louden offers several ways to use the book, which is perfect for people like me who are too busy to sit down and read the book straight through. Reading straight through is one option, of course, but other just as functional alternatives include opening various sections and asking yourself one of the life planner questions or exploring one of the life organizing tips, taking one of the life organizing steps, reading one of the stories, or committing a small act of kindness–to yourself. The book can be used linearly or randomly, once a day or once a week.
The Life Organizer is truly an innovative, unique, and practical process for finding solutions to the daily ragged rush of women’s lives by reaching out–by way of reaching in. It’s intuitive, grounded, and somehow divine. And even I can do it. You?
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