Excerpt From Oddball: A Memoir and Resilience
Assess Your Home to create a calm space
Sometimes we can get used to things. Designers call it design blindness. I prefer the term desensitization. In other words, we can live and work in a place that isn’t healthy or is out of balance but become immune to and not notice it though it is affecting you negatively. The point is to experience things with a purposeful awareness to gain a new and objective perspective. This means we make a mindful assessment of our living and working spaces the way you do with re-connecting with your bodily, emotional and spiritual needs.
Room by Room
Regardless of whether you are entering a new space or evaluating a current space, use your senses to determine how it sounds, feels, and smells. This tells you the state of your place regarding health and safety. Trust all your senses. Things may seem OK, but if you still feel something is wrong, do a bit more research. You may find something that may not be immediately available, like hidden mold for instance, but can be confirmed with the right investigation. This will save you your health, time, energy, peace of mind and money later on.
Typically, any given space has four walls of various shape, height and size, a ceiling and floor. These basic elements of a space can have limitless changeability. Rooms in structures are created for certain purposes, e.g., a bedroom to sleep, a kitchen to eat, a dining room to dine, office to work. Realistically however, most of us know we do all kinds of actions in all kinds of places. With that said, we need some type of order to be in balance. Fields like engineering and construction rely on order. Using a subfield like Interior Design is a way to gain and maintain the basic order and balance that are there and take it a few steps further and enhance it functionally and aesthetically.
Regardless of the purpose of the space we dwell in, chaos often comes in wreak havoc in our slowly or suddenly. This is when our creative spirit and resilience can save us and we restore our home to a place of safely, balance, order and beauty.
To help you in the design process it is crucial to know the difference between what is controllable and non-controllable. Control-ables are things you can change, manipulate, and adjust according to your needs and desires. Non-control-ables is the opposite, things, features, parts and ideas you cannot implement for various reasons. One you know what you are dealing with then you can decide what to do in each case.
For instance, in the case of non-control-ables you may have something you want to do but cannot because you may rent but not own the space where you live. Therefore have some restrictions. Even if you own your home, there may be restrictions and in this case you have to find how to move forward in any given situation. The non-controllable issues are by far the challenging ones. These can include difficult neighbors, bad landlords, environmental factors like bad smells, noise, unpleasant vibrations like bass vibes or construction, infestation of insects/rodents, toxins, uncomfortable air and water temperature, dangers, etc.
In some cases there may be very little you can do that would not make things worse. In these extreme cases, you may have to resort to using the grace prayer, practicing gratitude for the things that are working and useful, create boundaries somehow, to control unpleasant or dangerous situations.
Spaces do contain and hold energy. Good and bad, positive and negative. This means having an open mind as to solutions to any challenges and using common sense, logic, physical and metaphysical remedies, like Feng shui.
How do you manage your control-ables and non-control-ables?