Repacking Your Bags - Lighten Your Load for the Good Life

Zusatztext 91258423 Informationen zum Autor Richard J. Leider and David A. Shapiro Klappentext Revised and updated: The classic guide to "unpacking" your physical, emotional, and intellectual baggage and "repacking" for the journey ahead.   Richard Leider and David Shapiro define the good life as “living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work, on purpose.” But with longer lifespans, technological advancements, and economic shifts, the particulars of this definition are bound to change over time—which mean most of us will need to periodically reimagine our lives.  In this wise and practical guide, Leider and Shapiro help you weigh all that you're carrying, leverage what helps you live well, and let go of those burdens that merely weigh you down. This third edition has been revised with new stories and practices to help you repack your four critical “bags” (place, relationship, work, and purpose); identify your gifts, passions, and values; and plan your journey, no matter where you are in life.What Is the Good Life? In the Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson plays Gil, a successful Hollywood screenwriter visiting Paris with his fiancé, Inez. Gil, who is struggling to complete his first novel, falls in love with the city, and fantasizes about moving there, a prospect Inez, who can hardly wait to get back to Southern California, considers just silly romantic nonsense. Although Inez’s dismissal of Gil’s dream is a symptom of deeper problems in their relationship, she has a point. Because it’s not even contemporary Paris that Gil adores — not the Paris of the 21st century — rather, he has fallen in love with a dream: Paris of the 1920s, the Paris of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and the whole Lost Generation of Americans who made the City of Lights their home after World War I. In fact, so powerfully does Gil long for this time that one night, to his surprise and consternation, he is magically transported back to that world: he is picked up at midnight by Scott and Zelda and taken in a limousine to a party, where he meets such luminaries as Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and of course, Hemingway himself. At first, understandably, he can’t believe what is happening, but eventually, he comes to accept that it’s real, and is thrilled by his good fortune. The next night, he invites Inez to accompany him, but she tires and goes home before the magical limousine appears. When it does, at midnight, Gil goes off alone into the past, and Hemingway takes him to the salon of Gertrude Stein, who to Gil’s delight, agrees to read and critique his novel. He meets Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, and most significantly, makes the acquaintance of a beautiful young woman, Adriana, Picasso’s muse and lover. We come to know that her relationship with the famous artist is tumultuous and certain to end badly, soon. But for Gil, it is love at first sight; he can’t get her out of his mind, even when he returns, in the morning, to his contemporary life. Gil makes up excuses to Inez so he can keep going back to the past. And what transpires is that he comes to see his life there, back in the 1920s, as his “real” life. So desperately has he wanted to live a life that wasn’t his own, a life that he has glamorized as more beautiful, more poetic, more meaningful than the one he has made for himself, that, soon, he has fully embraced that world, so much so that he wants to stay there always. He begins an affair with Adriana, who, as predicted, has been dumped by Picasso. They share their hopes and dreams, Gil revealing his belief that Paris of the 1920s is the perfect world, the time and place where art, culture, and society reached their apex. Adriana, by contrast, contends that it was Paris of La Belle Epoque, the time of Impressionism and Art Nouveau, when the city w...

Product details

• Authors: Richard J Leider, Richard J. Leider, David A Shapiro, David A. Shapiro
• Publisher: Berrett Koehler Publishers
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.11.2012
• EAN: 9781609945497
• ISBN: 978-1-60994-549-7
• No. of pages: 232
• Dimensions: 154 mm x 229 mm x 16 mm
• Subject: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Lifestyle, personal development