When I was a little girl, I looked up to a handful of women and older girls around me. Females in my sphere who seemed to have it all together. They wore beautiful clothes, they knew how to be charming and make friends, their daily habits were chic, and they just seemed to have that level of glamor that I couldn’t quite define but desperately wanted.
In my desire to be like that, I put lots of time and effort into preparing for events. I collected pretty things and put them aside for special occasions, but never actually used them. I’d put lots of effort into looking great for upcoming celebrations, or create elaborate plans for how to make some event “perfect”. And yet no matter how much effort I put in, I schlepped through life, frumpy, unfeminine, and ungraceful. I figured they had to be working so much harder than I was, to get such great results. Either that, or they knew something that I did not.
It turns out that it was the latter.
When I was in my early twenties, I read somewhere about the concept that the more frequently you do something, the more important it is to maximize your pleasure in that area. I don’t remember now exactly where I read it, though if I had to take a guess, it was probably an Alexandra Stoddard book.
The author suggested that people focus on improving their pleasure in eating, sleeping, and bathing. She focused on these, because they are activities that we all do every day.
Simple daily pleasures
The more that I thought about it, the more I realized that that was the difference between me and those glamorous women I saw when I was growing up. They had focused their attention on doing everyday things well. They had elevated the mundane to an art form, rather than saving their attention and effort for occasional special events.
That was the magic key. The ordinary. The daily mundane. That was what I needed to improve!
To this day, I still agree with that author that eating, sleeping, and bathing are the best place to start in upgrading your life. Also that the effort you invest into improving the pleasure in daily activities will yield a vastly higher return than focusing on special occasions.
What can you do today, to upgrade in some small way an activity that you do daily?
