With a New Year comes the best intentions for making resolutions that promise to make positive changes to improve the quality of the upcoming chapters of one’s life. We all have them. Some are repeat performers – have been tried in the past, but perhaps not so successfully accomplished.
Take Oprah – that gal with the Midas touch – she looks at something and smiles and it is an instant hit – she endorses it and WOW – gotta have it- good as gold! Right now Oprah is blitzing the TV with her ads for Weight Watchers. She has a major investment with that brand that has only increased in value with her endorsement and fractional ownership. Yet the angle is that she plainly and unabashedly states along with photos and videos that she too has known failure and difficulty accomplishing certain goals. She is right there in front of the camera speaking frankly to the viewers about the trials of her ongoing, struggling, journey to master her own weight control and the invitation for viewers to join her and start now. What an honest and effective approach to starting a new resolution or an old one failed and revisited.
Another popular resolution, and one the pertains directly to interior design, is cleaning house – figuratively as well as literally. In fact much of these resolutions seem to be about eliminating excesses. Excess weight, excess obligations, excessive habits…but let’s just address the literal act of culling clutter and eliminating excesses of things as pertains to your interior spaces.
Surrounding yourself with items that bring happiness, memories and stimulate in a positive manner is the root of pleasing interior design for your personal spaces. Decorating with favorite color combinations and decorative accessories is a very personal statement for each individual. Sharing your space brings compromise and creativity to this process melding different life experiences and the items that represent them. But as life stages come and go so might the true attachment to these things acquired and collected over time. But the root of it all is to surround yourself with things that make you happy – that please you.
That’s when the resolution to de-clutter becomes desirable, if not necessary. Which brings this blog to the focus of paring away until you are only living with things that bring you joy. As stated in the best-selling book the life-changing magic of tidying up by Marie Kondo as she continually reminds her reader that they should “be surrounded by things that spark joy ” and that the result will make them “happy.” It’s a Japanese art as is so true of so many simple, spare, precious things Japanese. It is restraint that we all should perhaps strive to emulate. The result being freeing, refreshing and simple.
Who doesn’t want to achieve happiness? If tidying up can have so many benefits, then doing so would be the magic that Kondo promises will result. If we follow her cleansing steps – changing our lives for the better, we will find happiness.
I love this intriguing little book. It touches on so many realities and oh so truisms. I love the promise and the helpful manner in which it outlines the order to proceed. It seems so simple and yet it appears to be a better process for those with small spaces, few things and a fairly manageable inventory to attack. It became obvious to me that inasmuch as I wanted to dive into this new program right away and reap the results – it was going to be a bigger, longer process than promised. This is a primer to begin to think about commencing to get started with this daunting albeit needed task.
Yet, I do love the book and will embrace many of its instructions and principles in a month or so after a long anticipated vacay to the southern climes of warmth and inspiration and another opportunity to collect and bring home a little more cool stuff!!!
Thank you Tricia!!!!!!!!!!!!!
