This past year has been so strange for all of us, and Claire Cook’s new book, Life Glows On: Reconnecting With Your Creativity to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life perfectly captures the feelings we all felt as we struggled to navigate through our strange new normal.
I have been a fan of Claire Cook’s books for many years, and this is exactly the book I needed right now.
Claire’s focus on rediscovering your creativity is designed specially for midlife women, or the ‘forty to forever’ group as she describes it. Her authentic and candid conversation about Covid, and its affect on all of us is refreshing and so relatable. Reading books by Claire Cook often feels like grabbing a cup of tea and chatting with a good girlfriend, and this book is no exception. Her humor and honesty shine through the pages.
Like so many of us, Cook’s life was impacted by the Covid pandemic, but in true Claire Cook fashion she searched for the brighter side and used the time to focus on re-discovering her creativity and she takes all her readers along for the ride.
This book is not only inspirational, but Cook address the practical challenges that all of us face when we explore our creative side, and she offers her own life experience to help us navigate our own creative journeys.
As she describes, “The staggering stress of this time can make us all feel like we’re floating, wingless and untethered and spiraling downward.” Her advice on finding our own creativity is simple and practical, with just the right amount of whimsy. One of her suggestions is to “Write BE CREATIVE TODAY in red lipstick on your bathroom mirror so you look at that first thing in the morning instead of obsessing about that new wrinkle that appeared overnight”.
As Claire Cook says, “Sometimes the creative goal or project is secondary to the creative journey it takes us on.”
For so many of us this past year has been an opportunity for self-reflection. Reading this book helped me to focus on what’s important in my life. It is so valuable to see the vulnerability she shares with her readers. When I hear her say “I’m proud of the woman I’ve become and how hard I’ve worked to get here and how many bumps in the road I’ve managed to survive along the way” it resonates so much.
She challenges her readers to really go for it. In one chapter she asks, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid to be embarrassingly bad at it?”
This book is full of quotes and helpful tidbits to address self-sabotage, procrastination and so many of the other struggles that we encounter along the way
Her genuine love for others shines through as she tells readers “My purpose in writing this book is to share everything I’ve learned on my own creative path that might help other forty-to-forever women (and those few good men!) in theirs.”
Claire Cook explains that she wrote this book “To process my Covid-19 pandemic and post-pandemic experience as I dig my way out from it”. There is no doubt that we all benefit from her experience.
This book was full of motivation, ideas, and the push we all need to explore our own creative side.
And she leaves us with some final words of advice, “so let’s get back out there, reconnect with our creativity, and make the rest of our lives the best of our lives”
Thank you for this fabulous, beautifully written review. I'm so glad the book resonated for you!
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