Search results for ""school of life""

A blank notebook with a soft back with rounded corners, bellyband & elastic closure.

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A book to offer clarity and guidance when facing the difficult decision of whether your relationship has a future.

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A book to inspire closeness and connection, helping people not only to find love but to make it last. Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships – yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship might therefore be intuitive and easy. This book starts from a different premise: that love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt. It calmly and charmingly takes us around the key issues of relationships, from arguments to sex, forgiveness to communication, making sure that success in love need never again be just a matter of luck. Part of a new essential paperback series from The School of Life, covering a range of emotional lessons needed in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

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A 15th anniversary collection of The School of Life’s most popular and essential essays on self-knowledge, relationships, work and culture. The School of Life is an organisation with a focused mission at its heart: to help foster calm, self-understanding and greater emotional maturity. In celebration of The School of Life’s 15th anniversary, we have gathered together ten of our landmark essays on key topics in a collectible edition. Among these, we find: Self-Knowledge, On Confidence, What is Psychotherapy?, How to Find Love, The Sorrows of Love, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, Why We Hate Cheap Things, How to Reform Capitalism, The Sorrows of Work and What is Culture For? In elegant and always clear prose, the essays take us on a tour around the central topics of emotional life, leaving us enlightened, calmer and readier to greet our inevitable challenges. With a new introduction from The School of Life, this book amounts to nothing less than a concise compendium of some of the wisest things we’ll ever need to know.

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A journal that seeks to honour the act of therapeutic writing containing journaling prompts to find inspiration and encouragement.

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A guide to developing the art of finding serenity by understanding the sources of our anxiety and frustrations. Almost all of us wish we could be calmer; it is one of the distinctive longings of the modern age. Across history people have sought adventure and excitement, however a new priority for many of us is a desire to be more tranquil. This is a book designed to support us in our endeavours to remain calm against all the adversities life throws at us. A calm state of mind is not a divine gift, we can alter our responses to everyday things and educate ourselves in the art of remaining calm, not through slow breathing or special teas, but through thinking. This is a book that explores the causes of our greatest stresses and anxieties and gives us a succession of highly persuasive, beautiful and sometimes dryly comic arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and confusion. Part of a new essential paperback series from The School of Life, covering a range of emotional lessons needed in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

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Explores and appreciates the small pleasures found in everyday life. So often we exhaust ourselves and the planet in a search for very large pleasures, while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which if only we paid more attention could bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort. This is a book to guide us to the best of life’s small pleasures: the distinctive delight of holding a child’s hand, having a warm bath or the joy of the evening sky. It is an intriguing, evocative mix of small pleasures to heighten the senses and return us to the world with new-found excitement and enthusiasm. Small pleasures are points of access to the great themes of our lives. Every chapter puts one such moment of enjoyment under a magnifying glass to find out what’s really going on and why it touches, moves and makes us smile.

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We accept without shame that most organs in our bodies might at some point develop problems – and could need a bit of help. We should not make an exception of our minds. Our lives are so complicated and so filled with burdens, we should be completely unsurprised if, at some point, we felt a need to pull up a white flag and ask for help with our minds. This is a guide to how to cope with a variety of forms of mental pain and unwellness, from the very mild to the more severe. It explains to us how and why we might become ill, how we can explain things to friends and family, how we should take care of ourselves – and how we might adjust our view of ourselves and our future so as to live wisely alongside our difficulties. Throughout the tone is humane, encouraging and rich with experience. A central idea is that there is no need for any of us to suffer alone with our condition and that the best way to mend is to reduce shame, accept our troubles as very normal – and seek out understanding and friendship. It’s by exploring and discussing what has happened to us that we can heal and reduce our sense of isolation. Written with kindness, knowledge and sympathy, and drawing upon the experience and knowledge of The School of Life therapists, this book is an essential tool to help us on the way to our recovery.

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A reassuring guide on how to overcome failure, teaching us that we can learn to fail well This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without failing – in small and usually also in large ways. Sometimes our failures are very obvious, at other times, we feel we have to conceal them out of shame. This book encourages us to accept the role that failure plays for all of us and to feel compassion for ourselves for the messes we can’t help but make as we go through our lives. Our societies talk a lot about how to succeed: we’d end up so much wiser and calmer if we learnt how to cope better with the more likely scenario of failure. This is a book packed with dignified, sensible, kindly suggestions about how to approach failure: how to deal with friends, how to cope with enemies, how to endure regret, how to pick oneself up, how to accept oneself despite one’s flaws, and how to endure and thrive in new, less than ideal circumstances. It’s a perfect volume for anyone who has ever had a relationship breakdown, suffered a career reversal, made enemies, bungled a project or wasted their time – in other words, for all of us. When we fail, it can sometimes seem as if we are alone in this however, in truth, there is nothing more human than to fail – and nothing wiser and more necessary than to learn to fail well.

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Modern life is full of minor but acute dilemmas: we get stuck at a gathering with someone unusually boring and wonder how to move on without causing offence; in the course of introducing one friend to another, we realise that we have forgotten one of the party’s names; we run into an ex while on an early date with a new partner; we spill red wine across a host’s sofa... Such dilemmas might – at one level – seem desperately insignificant. But they actually belong to some of the largest and most serious themes in social existence: how can you pursue our own agenda for happiness while at the same time honouring the sensitivities and wishes of others; how can you convey goodwill with sincerity; how can you be kind without being supine or sentimental? These dilemmas were once covered by books on etiquette or manners. The modern age often doesn’t seem to value manners, equating them with an old fashioned stuffiness, instead we are advised to communicate our feelings and tell it the way it really is. But the result, in practice, is that we are often confused as to how to act around others and discharge our obligations to them. This book puts good manners back at the centre our lives. It features twenty case-studies on common social dilemmas and our possible responses to them, contributing to a new and original philosophy of graceful conduct. Manners are far from negligible fancies; they stand at the day-to-day end of a hugely grand and dignified mission which The School of Life is committed to: the creation of a kinder and more considerate world.

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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Give the gift of inspiration: an essential guide to living wisely and well, no matter what challenges the world throws at you - from Alain de Botton, the bestselling author of The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel and The Course of LoveThis is a book about everything you were never taught at school. It's about how to understand your emotions, find and sustain love, succeed in your career, fail well and overcome shame and guilt. It's also about letting go of the myth of a perfect life in order to achieve genuine emotional maturity. Written in a hugely accessible, warm and humane style, The School of Life is the ultimate guide to the emotionally fulfilled lives we all long for - and deserve. This book brings together ten years of essential and transformative research on emotional intelligence, with practical topics including: - how to understand yourself- how to master the dilemmas of relationships- how to become more effective at work - how to endure failure- how to grow more serene and resilient Praise for Alain de Botton:'What he has managed to do is remarkable: to help us think better so that we may live better lives' Irish Times'A serious and optimistic set of practical ideas that could improve and alter the way we live' Jeanette Winterson, The Times'Alain de Botton likes to take big, complex subjects and write about them with thoughtful and deceptive innocence' Observer

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A guide to rediscovering niceness as one of the highest of all human achievements. Many books seek to make us richer or thinner. This book wants to help us to be nicer: less irritable, more patient, readier to listen, warmer and less prickly. Niceness may not have the immediate allure of money or fame, but it is a hugely important quality nevertheless, and one that we neglect at our peril. On Being Nice gently leads us around the key themes of the often-forgotten quality of being nice. It discusses how to be charitable, how to forgive, how to be natural and how to reassure, as well as the importance of navigating interpersonal relationships with compassion and kindness. Ultimately, the book encourages us to understand that niceness is compatible with strength and is not an indicator of naivety.

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A practical guide to finding fulfilling work by understanding yourself. The idea that work might be fulfilling rather than just necessary is a recent invention. These days, in prosperous areas of the world, we don’t only expect to get paid, we also expect to find meaning and satisfaction. A Job to Love is designed to help us better understand ourselves in order to find a job that is right for us. It explores the myths, traps and confusions that get in our way and shows us how to develop new, effective attitudes and habits.

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A collection of enlightening quotes, delivering some of the most important lessons The School of Life has to offer. This is a selection of the very best and most psychologically acute quotations from The School of Life, covering such large and diverse topics as relationships, regret, anxiety, work, friends, family, travel and, not least, the meaning of life. Some of these quotations elicit an immediate nod of recognition, others leave us thoughtful and a few are just plain funny. The book is organised by The School of Life’s key themes – Relationships, Self-Knowledge, Sociability, Work, Calm and Leisure – that together amount to a tour around the most profound sorrows and joys of the human mind and heart. Offering comfort and consolation in a compact format, The School of Life Book of Quotations is ideally suited to our impatient, anxious and searching times. Quotations: ‘The best cure for unrequited love: get to know them better.’ ‘Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.’ ‘The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.’ ‘Insomnia is the mind’s revenge for all the thoughts we forgot to have in the day.’

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An outline for a new kind of wedding ceremony free from theology, with new rituals designed to prepare us for modern marriage. Many of us are attracted to the idea of marriage and yet feel a bit uncomfortable with some of the rituals that are traditionally associated with the big day. Perhaps the old ceremonies place too much emphasis on religion or else seem out of step with some of the complex realities of contemporary relationships. In response to this dilemma, The School of Life has rethought what the ideal wedding day would consist of and redesigned the process for modern couples. The book proposes new ways of getting prepared for a wedding at a psychological level, suggesting how couples should ready themselves for the often tricky journey ahead. It presents an entirely practical and thoughtfully redesigned wedding ceremony, from picking out a suitable venue to suggested vows and readings. Finally, it offers some ideas for how to approach the start of married life.

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AS HEARD ON THE DIARY OF A CEO PODCAST WITH STEVEN BARTLETTFrom the Sunday Times bestselling author of The School of LifeA healthy mind knows how to hope, hanging on tenaciously to the reasons to keep going.A healthy mind resists unfair comparisons, not allowing others’ successes to throw it off course.A healthy mind avoids catastrophic imaginings, distinguishing worries of what could happen from what likely will.Just as there is no such thing as a human being who will never become physically ill, there is no human who will go their whole life without becoming mentally unwell. But recognising ourselves when we’re well can do a lot to help us identify what can go awry. Written with his signature kindness and empathy, this book is Alain de Botton’s practical guide to caring for our mental health – from the acts of self-care in which we find respite to the help which psychotherapy can bring.Mental illness is as common, and as unshameful, as its bodily counterpart. We should be no more reluctant to seek help than we are if we develop a chest infection or sore knee - and we are no less worthy of love and sympathy in those moments. This book is a reminder of that.'Alain de Botton is a brave and highly intelligent writer' Observer'One of our most consistently illuminating writers on contemporary culture' John Gray, New Statesman

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AS HEARD ON THE DIARY OF A CEO PODCAST WITH STEVEN BARTLETTFrom the Sunday Times bestselling author of The School of LifeA healthy mind knows how to hope, hanging on tenaciously to the reasons to keep going.A healthy mind resists unfair comparisons, not allowing others’ successes to throw it off course.A healthy mind avoids catastrophic imaginings, distinguishing worries of what could happen from what likely will.Just as there is no such thing as a human being who will never become physically ill, there is no human who will go their whole life without becoming mentally unwell. But recognising ourselves when we’re well can do a lot to help us identify what can go awry. Written with his signature kindness and empathy, this book is Alain de Botton’s practical guide to caring for our mental health – from the acts of self-care in which we find respite to the help which psychotherapy can bring.Mental illness is as common, and as unshameful, as its bodily counterpart. We should be no more reluctant to seek help than we are if we develop a chest infection or sore knee - and we are no less worthy of love and sympathy in those moments. This book is a reminder of that.'Alain de Botton is a brave and highly intelligent writer' Observer'One of our most consistently illuminating writers on contemporary culture' John Gray, New Statesman

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20 unique prints encapsulating the most important lessons The School of Life has to teach. Art is never merely decoration. From cave paintings to modern sculpture, our species has always used pictures and images to express our most important ideas: encapsulating the messages we deem necessary to remember in order to live better lives. Far from simply being objects of beauty, art is a reminder of what truly matters. Bold Truths is a collection of wise statements immortalised as art: 20 philosophical prints encapsulating the most important lessons The School of Life has to teach. Brought to life by leading artists and designers, they’re ready-made prints that can be lifted out and displayed in your home or place of work as a permanent reminder of how to live well. They’re a perfect marriage of beauty and utility: exquisite illustrations of essential ideas.

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Many of us are attracted to the idea of marriage and yet feel a bit uncomfortable with some of the rituals that are traditionally associated with the big day. Perhaps the old ceremonies place too much emphasis on the supernatural or else seem out of step with some of the complex realities of contemporary relationships. In response to this dilemma, the School of Life has rethought exactly what the ideal wedding day would consist of and redesigned the entire process from scratch for the use of modern couples. The book begins by proposing new ways of getting prepared for a wedding at a psychological level, suggesting how couples should ready themselves for the often tricky journey ahead and how to think through some of the thorniest issues that beset love. The book then presents an entirely practical and thoughtfully redesigned wedding ceremony, from picking out a suitable venue to suggested vows and readings. Finally, the book offers some ideas for how to approach the start of married life. What follows is a bold rethinking of one of humankind's most important and popular rituals.

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On Divorce is the debut title in a new portrait photography series by The School of Life. The photographs and accompanying texts were captured and recorded over two years by British photographer Harry Borden (himself divorced). The images are a mirror that can help to correct some of what we think we know of divorce and pull us in a different direction: towards compassion, identification, curiosity, self-reflection and empathy. The book features an introduction by The School of Life, which gives context to Borden’s photographic study. Harry Borden is an acclaimed British portrait photographer. His work is regularly published in major news outlets and is part of the collection of The National Portrait Gallery in London. Previous publications include Single Dad (2021) and Survivor: A Portrait of the Survivors of the Holocaust (2017).

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Being a parent can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. It is also - intermittently - the cause of some of our deepest sorrows. It is likely that we will spend at least some of the time in despair and confusion, wondering whether it really had to be so hard. Philosophy has, over the last 2,000 years, been a discipline committed to calm, kindness, perspective and a reduction of paranoia. It is one of the most useful sources of solace and humanity. This invaluable book is made up of 26 small essays that aim provide understanding of and consolation for the trials and pleasures of parenting. They will provoke insight, recognition and a far more forgiving, generous assessment of one's challenges. The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting promises us a gentle way of staying calm around one of the most arduous yet deeply fulfilling jobs in the world. What people are saying about The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting: “Very helpful and wise insights that bring a little peace of mind.” “Great book and it's a must give gift for new parents.” Jeff “This is a very moving and reassuring. Beautiful quality book too.” Sam “Thanks School of Life, it's been an eye opening and reassuring read.” Beth “The presentation as a board book for children is great fun. It made advice seem light handed and possible.” Josephine

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It is a daily undertaking – a morning shot of coffee, an absentminded sandwich at your desk, a hastily assembled dinner with the remnants from the fridge... With its every day ubiquity we can make the mistake of assuming that food is of little importance, or simply fuel to see us through the day. But what is its real impact on our emotional lives, and how can we better nourish ourselves? What we eat and how we eat it has a significant impact on our psychological well-being. In recent times, our society has been eager to recruit food to the project of physical health, but we’ve not always paid so much attention to how cooking and eating can assist us with our emotional health. With over 150 recipes, Thinking & Eating shows how ingredients and dishes can be supporters of certain ideas, emotions and states of mind that best help us confront the challenges of existence. In each recipe we discover of the ways in which food can store, memorialise and transmit the most important ideas of our lives.

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Often, when we need to mark where we’ve got to in a book, we bend back the page or reach for an old receipt, but there’s a particular pleasure in having a robust and elegant bookmark to hand. Here are twenty bookmarks, unusually assembled into a small pull-out ‘book’ that simultaneously offers, across its surfaces, an essay on the business of reading: why we do it, what the best books do for us, and how literature might change our lives. This book of bookmarks prompts small, artful occasions when, at the start or end of a reading session, we can pause to consider the power of books and their vital place in our lives. Excerpts Include: “The moment we cry in a book is often not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected. We cry about our hopes” “One kind of good book leaves us asking: how did the author know that about me? By looking particularly deeply into their own secrets, authors simultaneously guess everyone else’s” “The best books put their finger on emotions that we recognise as deeply our own, but could never have formulated on our own.” “Books are like people; we meet many but fall in love very seldom. Perhaps only ten books will ever truly mark us. We shouldn’t feel ashamed of abandoning the ones that don’t work for us”

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Good work involves feeling engaged and motivated by what we’re doing – and battling inertia and weariness with courage and imagination. Fortunately, motivation is not a gift from the gods; it is a quality we can nurture in ourselves and encourage in others. ‘Motivation’ is a tool for increasing our effectiveness; 52 exercises designed to train our brains to find their bearings and generate their very best efforts. Our minds are not machines, and are prone to distractions, indecision and cognitive biases – but these can also be worked around and overcome. Each exercise prompts us to engage in activities and thought experiments that help us to surmount mental blocks and formulate strategies for solving problems and achieving our goals. At once a collection of psychological solutions and calls to action, this is an invaluable resource for unlocking our true potential.

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An insightful and illuminating guide on understanding the psychological legacy left to us by our parents.

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The modern world is richer, safer and more connected than ever before but it is – arguably – also a far less loving world than we need or want: impatience, self-righteousness, moralism and viciousness are rife, while forgiveness, tolerance and sympathetic good humour can be in short supply. This is a book that rallies us to remember how much we all long for, and depend on love: how much we need people to forgive us for our errors, how much everyone deserves to be treated with consideration and imagination and how being truly civilised means extending patience and kindness to all those we have to deal with, even, and especially, those who don’t naturally appeal to us. With the right encouragement, all of us are capable of immense kindness. But without it, we can also quickly descend into something far darker. This book reminds us of our better natures and mobilises us to fight for the kinder, more loving world we essentially long for at heart. Throughout, it frames love not as a romantic, idealistic fantasy, but as a hugely serious and dignified force that can save us from meanness and strife, defend us against chaos – and usher in hope and courage.

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We are so used to living in a media-saturated world that we do not notice just how much damage is being done to us daily by the images we see and the articles and posts we read. If you are often anxious or find it hard to sleep, or you regularly want to give up on your fellow human beings, the reason may come down to the relentless influence of the modern media. How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds is a guide for navigating the media today. The book encourages the reader to consider the many peculiarities of the modern media: its excessive focus on scandal, its emphasis on novelty, its capacity to breed envy and self-hatred, its high-minded defence of itself, its ever shorter attention span and its obsession with fame. The book teaches us how to liberate ourselves from the media, in order to achieve calm and a more generous, original and imaginative state of mind. We are shown how to redress the balance and emerge with a stronger, more positive outlook on life.

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One of the things we all deeply crave, and all richly deserve, is a more exciting life. We know well enough that many things have to be routine, hard and a little bit boring. But we also rightly sense that, if only we can find a way, our lives could be rendered intermittently more joyful, intense, thrilling and beautiful. This is a guide to the more exciting life we know could be ours. It isn’t about the outward things we might do: travel, parachute out of airplanes or learn a foreign language. This is a book of psychology and about how we can nurture a sense of inner liberation, accept our desires and aspirations and then have the courage to set ourselves free. Perhaps for too long we have resigned ourselves to things that aren’t fair or necessary, we have felt too constricted (and perhaps unloved) to communicate well with others and the proper expansion of our characters has been sacrificed for the sake of compliance. Now is a chance to recover some of our spirit, and to become open to the full intensity, beauty and mystery of life and to the richness of our own possibilities. Here is a guide to that more exciting life we know should – and can – be ours.

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52 cards designed to help find new ways of thinking about journaling.

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The idea of family lies close to the meaning of life, but in practice, families do not always come together, or chat about what matters, or laugh as much or as often as they should. Everyone gets too busy, or it can feel hard to get into certain topics – and without anyone meaning to, occasions keep slipping by. The Family Game is the solution; this is a game expressly designed to help family gatherings live up to our highest hopes. It consists of a host of questions (chosen randomly with a dice) that kick-start the best sorts of conversations: ones in which we reconnect, say things we always meant to, laugh warmly together – and remember why family counts. The cards cover 5 categories: Gentle Teasing - What would the movie of your family be called? Gratitude - To whom have you been a bit too moody? Self - How would you like to evolve? Memories - What was your favourite time of day when you were little? Regrets - If you could be forgiven for something, what would it be?

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Our society typically devotes huge attention to the start of a marriage – and particularly to the actual wedding ceremony. But the real challenge lies beyond the wedding, with the long years ahead – and here we are too often left on our own. This box is The School of Life’s guide to the rest of a life together, containing twenty beautiful cards which lay out the central ideas on how to make a relationship work over the decades beyond the wedding day. It is filled with artful suggestions on coping with what even the most loving couple will face as they build a life together. This set of cards is both a celebration of marriage and a rich source of insights into the skills it demands. Quotes From The Cards: In Praise of Compromise: ‘Couples who compromise are not the enemies of love: they may be at the vanguard of understanding what lasting relationships truly demand and what they are for. They deserve admiration, not condemnation.’ On Sex and Marriage: ‘The waning of sex is – far more than we collectively admit – a sign that a marriage is stabilising, not failing. If we more publicly admitted this, we’d be less panicked, less ashamed and a little less resentful when the sex got less intense and less frequent.

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We often overestimate how fragile we are. In our nightmares, we assume that life would become impossible for us far earlier than it actually would. In reality, we could manage perfectly well with a lot less than we currently have. Not that we should want this to happen, of course: it’s simply that we could bear it. We forget our resilience in the face of risk and become unnecessarily timid. Our lives become dominated by a fear of losing things that we could in fact do without. This set of cards is designed to gently remind us that we are far stronger than we imagine. Examples 3 a.m. alone in bed is perhaps not the optimal moment at which to derive a true picture of reality. Wait – always – for the perspective of dawn. Things don’t need to be perfect; we are creatures eminently suited to ‘good enough’. It sounds heartless to say: ‘you’ll get over it’. But you will. The brain is designed to exaggerate troubles. We suffer more in our thoughts than in reality.

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We are experts at focusing on what is missing from our lives. Our dissatisfaction often serves us well; it keeps us from complacency and boredom. But we are also dragged down by a pernicious inability to stop, take stock and recognise what isn’t imperfect and appalling. In our haste to secure the future, we omit to notice what is already very good. This pack of cards is designed to help us pause in our striving and, for a few moments, take on board some of what we have to be grateful for - a consoling, inspiring corrective to the lessons in cynicism and sourness that the world teaches every day. Example Cards: There were no outright catastrophes today. Others forget the stupid things we’ve done faster than we do. We can reinvent ourselves – a bit. Other people are usually shyer, sweeter and kinder than we’d anticipated We have managed to learn a few things down the years We don’t have to take ourselves seriously Many of the people we love are still alive. We could disappear for a bit. Many of the world’s most interesting people have written down their thoughts.

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Whatever our job title, our work will always benefit from new ideas and fresh ways of thinking. We’re used to regarding inspiration as something that arrives more or less at random; it is in fact a skill that we can learn to develop in ourselves and call on whenever we need it. Inspiration is a toolkit for generating new ideas: 52 exercises designed to foster an inventive frame of mind. With this to hand, we have no more need to wait for inspiration to strike; we can kindle it and deploy it as we require it. Each exercise prompts us to work on a particular creative muscle and helps us to establish the psychological conditions for original work. Drawing insights from the worlds of art, music, psychotherapy and innovation, this is an invaluable resource for creatives and professionals alike, helping our minds to become more reliable lightning rods for our numerous flashes of inspiration. Examples Sensory Deprivation Removing distractions and external stimuli can allow our mind to wander more freely. That’s why ideas tend to come to us in the shower, or just before we fall asleep. Sensory deprivation tanks are an extreme (and expensive) way of quieting the outside world. Create your own makeshift sensory deprivation tank. Find a spare office or free room and close the door. Turn out the lights, close the shutters or blinds, and switch off any electrical appliances. If it’s still noisy, use ear plugs or play white noise through some headphones. Stay in there for at least 10 minutes, or as long as you like. Use the time and space to think about your project – or try to think about nothing at all, and allow your mind to drift. Paint Like a Child Pablo Picasso spent his career developing his painting in an increasingly abstract direction. Near the end of his life, he remarked that although he was a technically accomplished painter at fifteen, ‘it look me a lifetime to paint like a child.’ Try to recall the person you were at five years old. How might you look at your work differently? What might strike you as humdrum, and what as exciting? What rules might you be prepared to break to honour the fiveyear-old you? company biography

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Meeting up with our friends is one of life’s great pleasures. We look forward to a chance to connect, share news and reaffirm our affection and sense of fun. But having a great time together, even with people we know well, is not necessarily as simple as it sounds. We don’t always manage to hit the right sort of topics of conversation and get to say the truly important things. This is a pack of cards with questions on them that guarantee that our encounters will be properly joyful and interesting. The questions take us through how conversation should ideally flow, from the more everyday topics to what is sincere, deep and tender. The cards take us on a perfect journey across a meal or a drink, from catching up to reconfirming why we matter to one another.

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40 images designed to lead you on a journey towards inward exploration of the self.

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