I am not a Buddhist. But I am a woman who has spent many years on a yoga mat, mostly for my back and also for my sanity, and who kept catching fragments of something older drifting through those rooms — a phrase from a teacher,…

My husband got there first. He'd been reading the Stoics — and then I began to see Stoicism mentioned in articles written by various minimalists, and eventually the household Venn diagram closed in on me. I came for the decluttering, as one does, and stayed for…

I found minimalism more than ten years ago, back when it was still a slightly eccentric thing to be interested in — before the beige linen photoshoots, before it became a look you could buy. It started, as these things do, quietly. Somewhere around the time…

I made a cup of tea this morning. A good one — proper leaves, the nice cup, thirty seconds of genuine optimism. Then someone couldn't find their sports socks, which were in the sports sock drawer, a location apparently known only to me. Then the dog…

Everyone in my family found their thing. You know the thing I mean — the calling, the lane, the answer to "and what do you do?" that comes out in one confident sentence. My parents had theirs. My siblings found theirs early and stayed, the way…

It was just an ordinary morning. School run done, coffee in hand, back home before 8am. Already running the day in my head - the lifts, the extra sports, the guests, the shopping, the work that needed doing. My mother had had a bad night, which…

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