Sometimes life doesn't have to be harder than it is. That's pretty much it, really. We just keep forgetting it. The Art of Taking It Easy is a gentle reminder that a simpler way of living is still possible.

The book is part meditation guide, part life philosophy, part love letter to easy living, and part argument that the counterculture kids were onto something real, even if the execution was sometimes a bit of a mess. Drawing on years of searching (twenty of them within Buddhism), a life lived across fields, forests and library shelves, encounters with people from every conceivable corner of the world, and a healthy skepticism toward anyone who tells you to optimize yourself, Elian D. Florentine makes the case for a more honest, less complicated way of moving through life.

Elian D. Florentine is a professional keeper of other people's books. He's been meditating for a few years, which has made him marginally calmer. He bowls, shoots longbow, and plants flowers in places nobody asked him to. Every now and then he writes something and forces it onto the world.