dominique browning - losing it

I chanced upon this story by the editor of the now-defunct House & Garden Magazine, Dominique Browning, in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It's an excerpt from “Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness,” to be published next month by Atlas & Company. I found it to be thought-provoking because it's an exploration of what really matters in life. It was also a window into someone else's struggle dealing with the loss of a job and going from a fast-paced daily routine to practically nothing. I'm looking forward to the book!

Unemployed, the author became obsessed with gazing at and eating eggs

It begins: "For 12 years, I had a job I loved as the editor of House & Garden, a magazine that celebrated the good life. It would be an understatement to describe this enterprise as part of a company not primarily in the business of philosophical, spiritual or moral soul-searching. Condé Nast’s roots and branches are in the material world. The good life at House & Garden generally meant cultivating your own backyard rather than being involved in the body politic. I pushed against the limits of making a so-called shelter magazine by publishing articles about spiritual issues and the environment, but I always felt clear-eyed about how things stood. I spent more than a decade in the belly of the beast of muchness and more. That was a precarious place to be when the real estate bubble began to leak."

For the rest, go here.

Dominique Browning also writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund Web site and has a new blog, SlowLoveLife.com.