A beautiful home gives a beautiful mind
Image by Malin Öqvist
My vacation is almost over and work starts this Monday. This summer, me and my wife have been working hard making the rooms in our house beautiful. We have hardly had any days “just chilling” and been busy all the time. And it felt great. Yesterday I had an epiphany when I realized that I haven’t changed the air filters in our ventilation system since we moved here a year ago. The thought had never crossed my mind, even though I have lived in a house before and I should have known it. It was not until the rooms had been decluttered and made beautiful, that I could see what had been in front of me all the time. It is a testament to the power of cleaning one’s room.
Our home has been in our family for three generations and my son is the fourth generation running on this land. However, due to declining health and the fact that no one lived here permanently for several years, mother Nature had done her job well reclaiming the place and reverting it to chaos. There were a million of small things to attend to. No major issues, luckily, but a lot of small ones. The kind of chores that can only be done by someone who lives here every day and are challenging if you only come here occasionally. Like fixing screws that are loose, getting rid of unwanted vegetation, changing lightbulbs and making sure that all the windows can be opened once again. And most of all, making the place your own, which is no small feat.
Before you can make a place your own, you must first restore the function of the rooms and make them usable. If a bedroom is used as a storage depot where you just throw stuff in and close the door, it cannot be made beautiful. Sometimes that is the only way to move forward and that is precisely how one of our bedrooms have been, and it is also the current state of our garage. But this summer, we have reclaimed the rooms one by one and come a long way. We are not finished and there are still rooms that aren’t functional, but my gut feeling is that we are “over the crest”. I suspect the reason is that we now – thanks to my wife – have several rooms that are not only decluttered but also beautiful!
I mentioned a story about the ventilation system in the beginning. I was unaware that the problem existed for a long time, and the air filters are likely clogged by now. Now the problem has moved to a different category of known problems. And that means I can do something about it. It is just like this problem couldn’t manifest itself before we opened up a slot in the “known” section in my mind. Perhaps we can arrange problems on a scale with different stages? The first step would be that we don’t know that we don’t know, the next step would be that we know that we don’t know, the third step would be that we know that we know (problem solved) and the fourth and final step would then be to make it beautiful. Let us compare it to a flow in a factory. Each station has a limited capacity to process units that arrive on the conveyor belt. If one station cannot cope with the flow, a bottleneck will occur, and the units start stacking up. If left unattended, the whole production chain will stall. In our case, the bottleneck occurred at the final “beauty stage”. There were zero capacity to add new problems, because the production (i.e. our problem-solving process) had stalled. This led to lost focus and a state of just running around and planlessly putting out fires. But as soon as the beautiful rooms arrived, it felt like a dam bursting. A range of new and more important problems were manifested. We now have the room to breathe and can start to prioritize among the problems accordingly. This not only gets things moving again, it even accelerates production. From an observer, making things beautiful might look like a small step, but the perceived difference is profound. I knew the importance of beauty before, but it has never been so clear to me as now. You can know stuff, but it is not until they are properly integrated in you that you can also feel them.
Or as Jordan B Peterson would say: “Clean your room”.