Beautify your space and renew it’s beauty
Everyone’s space matters, whether it’s a studio apartment, a spacious glassed-in office, a multi-room mansion or a cozy bungalow. Having a space to call your own is important and making that space function to its utmost is imperative. Having too many clothes, a non working kitchen table, oveflowing closets, an unusable garage, a desk piled with papers are all things that detract from a space’s usefulness and aesthetics. If we can’t enjoy where we work and live, if we are making room for all our things, where our things take precedence, then we have lost the game.
Our homes and offices should serve US, not vice versa. We shouldn’t be made slaves, beholden to our belongings. We can find ourselves enslaved by our things with less and less time and function for what we desire. By losing precious time each day looking for lost items, we sacrifice our time for creative expression, for joyful pursuits and for enjoying the community around us. We have to make a choice, to choose our stuff or to choose a new way of living.
We have grown immune to what it really looks like. I know friends who have lived with a broken door, window, or what have you for years. Like a person who incurs a disability, they have learned to incorporate the broken thing into their lives and no longer question it. They stop seeing it because they’ve become so accustomed to it and it no longer bothers them. Until someone from the outside comes in and sees the insanity this person is living with, they would never really question it. I recently looked at a 2-tier filing container on my desk that had been filled with the same papers for years. I suddenly felt the urge to put it on the floor, open it up and proceeded to quickly discard virtually everything in it. I had stopped seeing it. I had stopped questioning it. It had become a permanent fixture on my desk that I never looked at. These papers had, at one time, been relevant and I was keeping them for the sake of it. That, “one day I will need them or use them” scenario. It felt so liberating to purge them. They had outworn their usefulness and I was ready to do something about it.
Where are the places in your life you have allowed your sacred living and work space to be compromised? Yes, our spaces are sacred. We live in them. We create in them, cook in them, raise families and pets, interact, connect, pray, sleep and more. How could we not treat them with the respect they deserve? These spaces weren’t created to be dumping grounds for the unleft decisions we were unable to make. They are to hold ourselves and our lives so that we could thrive in them and not wither in them.
We have the opportunity each day to make a choice about how we live and how we express ourselves. We have the choice to move the impediments that have blocked our expression and productivity from flourishing. The past is gone and we can’t carry it with us, though many of us do in things we assign meaning to. Yes, it is fine to have keepsakes and memorabilia that are special to us. Yet not at the expense of our vitality and creative empowerment. We can choose to stay in the past and live a life that is as dusty as old photo albums or we can make new choices that support who we are today and to live in spaces that support our expression now. We matter. Our spaces matter. So let’s treat them as such.