LIVE LIKE A FLOWER: Live Beautifully

A prioritized life empowers you to live like a flower — a lovely and fragrant offering to a harried and distracted world. Change agent and author of Restoring Order, Vicki Norris, has some advice for living beautifully, inside and out.

1. Rethink order and beauty. Embrace order as a gateway to beauty. (It’s hard to enjoy aesthetics in the midst of chaos.) Train your mind that organizing your life and belongings is not a chore; it’s an investment in a lovely life.
2. Repurpose old things to new life. Rescue vintage buckets from the corners of your garage and shapely jars from your recycle bin or canning supplies, and turn them into vessels for flowers, pencils, or utensils. Bringing yesteryear into today provides comfort through nostalgia and conveys simpler times in today’s busy world.
3. Re-envision your space. Arrange your home or workplace around centers of activity and community (instead of by sterile rooms). Create a homework zone, a reading nook, a crafting nest, a creativity wall, or a workout niche. Make room for the things you love and create a refueling or reconnecting space. Incorporate flowers and plants in these areas. As well as beautifying and updating your living space, flowers boost emotional health. Harvard research proves people feel more compassionate toward others, have less worry and anxiety, and feel less depressed when flowers are present in the home.
4. Rehab your mind. Change in our natural environment or habits begins with a change of thinking. Make a list of the beautiful, lovely, praiseworthy things you can think about and post it near your sink. What we think about, we become.
5. Rejuvenate your senses. Take a break from the busyness of life and treat yourself to a visit to a relaxing spa, botanical garden, lavender field, or local flower shop. Surrounding yourself with the sounds, scents, and beauty of nature invites us to engage our senses, slow down, breathe and experience peace.
6. Refuse to dichotomize. Trade up from balance to integration. A completely balanced life is impossible and requires constant reallocation of time. An integrated life is one where we intentionally break down separations and blend our personal, professional, spiritual, and emotional lives together. An integrated life is a beautiful display of peace in an out-of-control world.

The Complete Live Like A Flower Series