An elegant hourglass sand timer which measures 15 minutes precisely from the start of each turn. In our time-pressed and information-rich world, it can be a challenge to find a moment for ourselves. Our lives are so busy and frenetic; we are always forgetting to make time for what really matters. The result is that anxiety builds and nagging concerns emerge in unhelpful ways. This hourglass sand timer reminds us to carve out 15 minutes a day for what truly counts. It demarcates a very modest and manageable period to dedicate to the important things we so often let slide - finally writing that letter to an old friend, rationally analysing our career ambitions, or playing in a concentrated way with a child. It’s an antidote to wasted days and a counter to the urge to procrastinate, prompting us to do a minimum of what really counts.

An interactive guide to our complex and elusive inner selves.

One of the most difficult tasks we face as humans is figuring out who we are. "Describe yourself" can be a surprisingly difficult task. Sometimes, we need prompts and suggestions to engage and energize us.

With unusual, entertaining, and playful exercises, this journal is designed to help us tease out and organize who we are. With beautiful designs by Marcia Mihotich throughout and mini essays on topics like relationships and work, this book shows us how our complicated, beautiful, and sometimes painful experiences all contribute to the richness of who we are.

• UNCONVENTIONAL AND PROVOCATIVE QUESTIONS to prompt honest self-reflection.
• AN INTERACTIVE JOURNAL OF SELF DISCOVERY with space for written answers.
• FULL COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS THROUGHOUT
• A COLLECTION OF MINI ESSAYS on topics like relationships, work, and culture.

We’re dependent on language to express how we feel, and yet words often feel vague or inaccurate. There are lots of moods, needs and feelings that our own language has not yet properly pinned down. 

The perfect word - even if it comes from abroad - helps us explain ourselves to other people, and its existence quietly reassures us (and everyone else) that a state of mind is not really rare, just rarely spoken of. 

This set of cards defines some of our favorite words from the world’s languages and marries them up with complementary images to create cards that bring some of our most important feelings into focus. We’ve created them to prompt greater reflection about the nature of language and emotions. These cards are designed to reflect the excitement we find in encountering an old photograph or an object in a flea market or antique stall, one that feels familiar yet foreign and is thus infinitely evocative.

Examples:

DUENDE (Spanish): A heightened sense of emotion created by a moving piece of art. 

FORELSKET (Norwegian): The euphoric feeling at the beginning of love. We can’t believe someone so perfect has wandered into our lives. They enhance and complete us. We might report: ‘I was overpowered by forelsket as our fingers interlaced…’ 

YŪGEN (Japanese): Gives a name to a mood in which one feels that the universe as a whole possesses a mysterious and elusive beauty. Moonlight, snow on distant mountains, birds flying very high in the evening sky, and watching the sun rise over the ocean all feed this sensibility.

This book explores ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less.

We live in a complicated, frenzied, and noisy world, filled with too much information, too many products, ideas, and opinions. As a result, many of us long for simplicity: a pared down, more peaceful, and less cluttered life. 

This book is a guide to the simpler lives we crave and deserve. In it, we learn about Zen Buddhism, modernist architecture, monasteries, psychoanalysis, and why three good friends and a few treasured belongings are enough. 

Taking a psychological approach, the book also guides us toward inner simplicity. For too long we've been drowning in excess, clutter, and confusion. A Simpler Life helps us tune out the static and focus on what really matters.

• DECLUTTER YOUR LIFE practical ways to get rid of physical and psychological clutter.
• HOW TO BE DIRECT advice on adopting a simpler, more straight-forward mindset.
• THE APPEAL OF MINIMALISM looks at why more of us are drawn to a pared down existence.
• HOW TO SIMPLIFY everything from relationships, social life, lifestyle, and work.

Alain de Botton's redemptive volume charts a course from collapse to recovery with kindness, compassion and wisdom.

“Alain de Botton, one of our era’s most uncommonly perceptive, lyrical, and lucid existential contemplatives.” — The Marginalian

A Therapeutic Journey is a collection of essays about mental challenge and health. Written with kindness, knowledge and sympathy, it is a practical guide to well-being and a source of consolation and companionship in what might be some of our loneliest, most anguished moments.

Alain de Botton explores how we can cope with a variety of forms of mental pain and illness, from the mild to the severe. It considers how and why we might become ill; how we can explain things to friends, family and colleagues; how we can find our ways towards recovery; and how we can build resilience, so as to live wisely alongside our difficulties.

At heart this is a book about happiness - about regaining the thread of our lives, rediscovering meaning, and finding our way back to connection, warmth and joy.