Posts by Annie
Monthly Mantra: July 2020
Forget success. Forget status. Do not aim to ascend the corporate ladder with greater speed than those before you. Do not try to attain “enoughness.” Stop your endless quest to build yourself up into a person other people take note of, so great is your success and your status and your corporate ladder ascension. There…
Read MoreMonthly Mantra: June 2020
The worst car accident I’ve ever been involved in happened two years ago, one hundred feet from my front door. It was a slick, frosty morning, and the woman cruising downhill never saw me. We skated across the intersection together, tires slipping, metal gnashing, airbags popping. I spent the whole day afterwards in a…
Read MoreLive Simply 2020: May Mantra
My sister and I, both diametrically opposed to being stopped, tried once to come up with an acronym for the phrase at which we worship: find a way to make it work. F-A-W-T-M-I-W. So you can see why that never became a thing. But our devotion to the concept remains. We know what you know,…
Read MoreSpring Favorites: 8 Essential Organizing Products
At the end of 2019, I compiled a list of the year’s most impressive, effective, and impactful organizing products–the ones that rocked our worlds (and, by extension, our clients’). But then we did a big move project, we worked with several dream clients, we sourced supplies for endless storage areas, and the page that the…
Read MoreLive Simply 2020: April Mantra
There is never a perfect moment. The world is never without strife. The universe is never devoid of suffering. Lately, it’s felt as if there is more hardship and anguish than normal. Communities are united in collective grief, with fear gripping the globe. Yet we are no less in charge of what we choose to…
Read MoreLive Simply 2020: March Mantra
It is so easy to stop. It’s easy to give up and give into the desire to be lazy. It’s infuriating, really, how easily exemplary slips back into mediocre. It takes just a handful of choices; fewer, probably. A closet’s beautifully organized status begins to be undone with a single garment not put back…
Read MoreLive Simply 2020: February Mantra
In almost every couple Live Simply has worked with, there is one person who tends to be more inclined to organization, and one who is less. There is one person excited to plow ahead with growth and progress, and one person dragging their feet and protesting to varying levels of severity. Yin and yang.…
Read MoreLive Simply 2020: January Mantra
It doesn’t matter what goals or resolutions you set, dreams you launch, ideas you create, or relationships you make; it is inevitable that at some point or other, you’re going to screw it up. I know, I know; it’s the first month of the year new–of the new decade!–and the blankness of the slate…
Read MoreLive Simply In 2019: December Mantra, Be Light
After I moved out of my parents’ house, there was a time when returning for visits was terribly depressing. Everything that’s hard about being there (chronic illness and the chaos that goes along with it) would smack me in the face upon entry, and I would wilt away like lettuce. Eventually, I realized my…
Read MoreLive Simply In 2019: November Mantra, Forgive Past Mistakes
Forgiveness is a spiritual reset button. “Begin again,” Forgiveness instructs. Release the offenses incurred, the standards unmet, the judgments rendered. View the situation, or that person, or yourself with compassion. Remember that everyone, including yourself, is sorting through hardships, and (probably!) doing their best to play the hand given. Begin (forgive) again, and again,…
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