The Book I Keep Going Back To
On simplicity, disconnection, and the quiet art of remembering how little you actually need.
There is one book I have returned to more times than I can count. Not because I have forgotten what it says, but because, somehow, I always need to be reminded.
L’art de la Simplicité by Dominique Loreau is one of my all-time favourite books, and I mean that in the truest sense. Not “favourite” as in a book I enjoyed once and liked. Favourite as in: this book has found me at my not-so-best and brought me back to myself. Every single time.
I first came across it during a period when my life felt not just busy, but cluttered. Not just with things, though there was plenty of that, but with noise. With obligations I hadn’t consciously agreed to. With a version of living that had somehow ballooned into something heavy and complicated and exhausting, without me quite noticing how it had happened.
I can’t remember who recommended it. But I remember reading the first few pages curled up with a cup of tea that had gone slightly cold, and feeling something in me settle. Like a long, slow exhale I hadn’t known I was holding.
Loreau is a Frenchwoman who has lived in Japan since the 1970s. She wrote L’art de la Simplicité after years of gradual metamorphosis, a deepening understanding, shaped by Japanese philosophy and her own experience, that we need far less than we think to live well. That simplicity is not poverty. It is refinement. It is the art of knowing what actually matters, and releasing everything that doesn’t.
The book is divided into three parts: the material, the body, and the mind. It moves through your home, your wardrobe, your relationship with money, your daily rituals, your inner life. It is not prescriptive or preachy. It is more like sitting with a very elegant, very wise woman who has already done the work, who has quietly stripped her life back to what is genuinely nourishing, and who is simply sharing what she found there.
What she found was freedom.
I come back to this book whenever I feel disconnected. That’s the best way I can describe it. There are seasons, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, when I feel like I’ve drifted from something essential in myself. When the accumulation of things to do, manage, and keep up with creates a kind of low-level static that makes it hard to hear my own thoughts. When I catch myself eating standing up, or scrolling without really seeing, or lying awake with a mind that won’t quiet because there is simply too much in it.
When I start confusing busyness with purpose, and filling with living.
In those moments, I reach for this book. I make something warm to drink, I find a quiet corner, sometimes my sofa, sometimes a café, once a windowsill in my dad’s farmhouse in Punjab with the late afternoon light coming in sideways, and I begin again from the beginning. Not because it gives me a plan. But because it reminds me.
It reminds me that I have always felt most like myself when things are quieter. When the surfaces are clear, and the diary has space in it, and I am not constantly moving on to the next thing. When I am actually present to what is in front of me, a cup of tea, a walk, a conversation that goes somewhere real.
It reminds me that I do not need much to feel and live well. And how easily, without meaning to, I accumulate far more than I need.
It reminds me that simplicity is not a project with an endpoint. It is a practice. An ongoing act of return.
I think this resonates so deeply in midlife because, by the time we reach this season, many of us have spent decades building. Acquiring. Adding. We have collected not just possessions but roles, responsibilities, relationships, habits, and identities that we accepted or accumulated without always examining them closely.
And then one day, often quietly, often without any single dramatic event, something shifts.
The fullness that once felt like success starts to feel like weight. The busyness that once felt like purpose starts to feel like noise. The life that once felt like ambition starts to feel like it belongs to someone else.
Loreau would call this the moment you are ready to simplify. Not just your home, though the home is a good place to start, and she is wonderfully specific about that, but your entire way of being in the world.
She writes about simplicity as a kind of inner ecology. A way of tending to yourself with the same care you might give to a garden, clearing what is crowded, making space for what needs to grow, and being discerning about what you allow in.
That metaphor has stayed with me for years.
What I love most about this book, what makes me return to it again and again, is that it never tells you to have less in order to suffer nobly. It tells you to have less in order to feel more. More ease. More presence. More pleasure in the things that remain.
There is a sensibility to Loreau’s approach that is very French, and very Japanese, and somehow, very me. She understands that simplicity is not about deprivation. It is about discernment. The difference between a life stripped bare and a life refined is enormous, and she knows that.
The simplified life she describes is still beautiful. Still sensual. Still rich with small pleasures and ritual and aesthetic care. It has just been cleared of everything that was getting in the way of its full enjoyment.
That distinction matters to me deeply.
There is a line in the book that I think about often. She writes that the less we have, the greater our sense of freedom and the better we can thrive.
I have tested that in my own life. The seasons when I have felt most alive, most myself, most at peace, they have never been the fullest ones. They have been the quieter ones. The ones where there was enough space to actually notice what was in them.
A clear kitchen counter on a slow morning. An afternoon with nothing scheduled and nowhere to be. A week where the diary had room to breathe, and I could feel my own thoughts again.
Midlife has a way of making this truth harder to ignore. Not because the world gets simpler, it often doesn’t. But because we do. We start to know ourselves better. We become less willing to perform constantly. We lose the appetite for noise we used to mistake for energy.
And in that quieter knowing, we begin to understand, maybe for the first time with real conviction, how little we actually need to live and feel well.
That is the gift Loreau gave me when I first read this book. And it is the gift she gives me again, every time I return to it.
The Practice
This week, find one corner of your life that has become cluttered. Not necessarily a physical space, though that works beautifully too. It might be your schedule. Your phone. A relationship dynamic. A habit. A commitment that somehow expanded beyond what you actually agreed to.
Sit with it for a moment. Make yourself a drink. Let it be quiet for once.
And ask: What would it feel like to simplify this?
Not emptying it completely. Just lightening it. Making it a little more like you.
That is where it starts x
If this has landed somewhere tender, the deeper work awaits you inside The Midlife Circle.
Below, we go beyond the idea of simplicity and into the practice of it, a life audit to find where the real weight is, a room reset that works as a ritual as much as a clear-out, and a week-long journal to help you map where you already feel free and where you’re still carrying more than you need to.
Because knowing you need less is one thing. Actually building a life around that knowing is another. And that is exactly what the Circle is for.
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