I love this. (And it's scary!) I think it's tricky because there's a great goodness in completion - in the sense of something being fulfilled. I guess it's the difference between completion as a goal in itself and completion as 'the ending that allows a new beginning'. One is stagnant and one is part of a living process. Thank you.
"I guess it's the difference between completion as a goal in itself and completion as 'the ending that allows a new beginning'. One is stagnant and one is part of a living process."
I really love, Susie, how you processed this. Truly. I think it is brilliant that you see one as a living process and one as stagnant. I would not have thought about it in those terms. Thank you for sharing that! I will be reflecting on that! 🩵
This concept provides freedom from pre-conceived notions of what something should be or look like. It definitely leaves room for improvisation and creativity. I love it! Thank you for this. Love, Virg
Thank you, Virg! Improv and creativity are so so important to our happiness and fulfillment. And how doesn’t love a little, maybe rebellion, in the process 🩵
"When are you going to put something there?" with the gentle subversion, "When the wall tells me what it wants to be."
For years I hung no curtains at my windows and no pictures on my walls.
Curtains are still minimal to non existent in my house in the woods. Why would I want to shut the beautiful outdoors out?
The walls have slowly filled with family grown art work.
A few pieces from my husbands grandfather.
I lot of pieces from my artistic sister.
A circular poem one of daughter's wrote.
The two last puzzles my daughter (Sheila) that died put together. One filled with butterflies--her favorite flying insect. Another with a young dark-haired girl, sitting next to a sheltie that looked like ours when she was a young dark-haired girl.
I waited for the walls and windows to tell me what they wanted.
I'm only halfway through your article, and I just have to comment about this. The incompleteness of a home space is also about giving the home the ability to be a living breathing space. It needs to be adaptable, mutable, changeable, adjustable.
Just like the toys with missing parts (brilliant tidbit there...I want to read that research), a home with unfinished spaces allows for the imagination to grow, for the home to evolve to the ever-changing and ever-growing needs of its inhabitants.
Just yesterday, we took four chairs and two lamps out to the garage. pieces that no longer fit my style or needs. The bright orange high back queen's chair that had all the character but never quite fit the space. The "stately" lamps that Hobbit never loved and that were too muted for the colorful space. But in the time I got them, they worked. I've changed since then. And so off they go, to be picked up by the organization that lets people coming out of homelessness shop for furniture and household goods for free. Each one, leaving an empty space where they once sat. and that empty space giving my imagination room to figure out who and what style I am now.
and, like rearranging the books on the shelf by color, and then rearranging them again by subject matter...or by just letting them land on the shelves that are most accessible for the thing that they are...they serve different functions in different spaces and also have the ability to mutate, change, adapt, and morph into new beings.
I love your work Alex. You inspire so much about my world, not just my reading, but my world.
Oh, thank you for sharing this. I love the example that you set in your comment. And I love where donate your household goods. What an incredible cause! 🩵
I wonder, how would the world change if we allowed ourselves to do the same as you share? When we give ourselves the space to be "adaptable, mutable, changeable, adjustable?" I bet our world would be so much happier and healthier. I believe that we all would be happier and healthier.
Alex, I love the way you described your grandparents’ home. Having space helps with that adaptability. Without some room to move in our house/yard, literally and figuratively, I feel like we’d lose the flexibility and coziness that has made us want to stay here even as our lives have changed drastically. Thanks for encouraging me to keep those spaces free and available for whatever comes next!
It's a lesson I keep learning. Leave something free so that I can fill it with whatever comes! Rather than fill everything to the brim. It goes back to an article you wrote a while ago about it being okay for us to learn the lesson over and over again - we learn variations of it, and we are more prepared each time, right? :)
Right! Forgot I talked about that. ;) I think the variations of the lessons are what create such interest and richness in our lives. They’re the fine lines we keep adding to the bold outline strokes that sketch out “the lessons,” and they make the drawing of our lives so much more beautiful. We can enjoy adding the lines by leaving space in our lives, and it’s that just a fun paradox?!
"Communing with drywall" - love this 😂 Each time I've moved, it's taken quite a while to put things on blank walls. I wait for the space to tell me what it wants, so I guess, without realizing, I also have been communing with drywall. Glad to hear I'm not the only one. 😉
Wonderful wrangling with a very challenging reality of emptiness and possibility. As a dancer who grew up in large empty movement studios I have always wanted such a space in my everyday home life. The home I have lived in for 12 years now basically worked on me for the first few years to empty my living room, which has a lovely old wooden floor, and just leave it that way. This is my favorite room in my house! I have to walk thru it to get to the bedrooms so it is well traveled. My piano now lives there along with a lovely stained glass window we hung in the east window to catch the morning sun. Otherwise it has remained “empty” and it soothes my body and soul every time I am in it or moving thru it! Thanks for this empty space wisdom!🙏🏼💃🏽
Hi CathyAnn, thanks for sharing! Oh, I bet you'd want a space in your home like that! Do you ever just dance through that room occasionally and lose yourself in the memory? Oh, those beautiful dance floors - I love the spaciousness they have. I'm so glad that you can experience that every time you walk through your room, on that old wooden floor, with a piano, and a stained glass window. Ahhhhhhhh. Beautiful 🩵
Wow, Alex, as usual, I have so much to say. You always give me a wealth of information to think about and reflect upon. Here's the first line that caught me: "It's an intuitive resistance to premature closure." I think about emptiness a lot--both literally and as an existential metaphor. The thing is, I share a home with six other humans, so truthfully, there are no blank walls or spaces. In fact, my kiddos struggle with executive functioning, so their spaces tend to be cluttered and disorganized.
That's hard for me. I want to stand in a room where I can stare at a blank wall and allow that to settle in my thoughts. I want to have literal space in my home where I feel I can breathe, where it's not claustrophobic to walk around something or through something else. It takes an immense amount of effort and energy on my part to keep our shared living spaces tidy, clean, and organized.
So I'm focusing today on what your words mean to me in a metaphorical sense, too. I especially felt a sigh of relief settle upon me with your bulleted suggestions/ideas at the end of your reflection, because it was almost like I needed someone to say directly, "You don't have to be an interior designer. Your living space can be a natural reflection of who you are and where you are in your life."
Thank you.
I guess, because I actually have two friends who are certified interior designers and another who constantly tells me about some new, trendy upgrade to her home, I have somehow felt embarrassed that our house is a hodgepodge of reused and vintage furniture and decor--much of which originated from Ben's mom, who is an antiques dealer and collector. I actually LIKE having old pieces with unique stories in our home, because they have character. I'd rather that than think I need to keep up a Better Homes & Gardens-type living space. That's too much pressure.
All this to say, I am thinking more and more about carving time (maybe over the summer?) to carefully go through each room in our house and decide what I love and therefore what to keep, versus what can be donated if it's gently used but has no real aesthetic meaning for me (and Ben). Your posts lately have got me thinking about that. Thanks, friend! See you on Zoom Thursday.
First - I LOVE that you have so many antiques and vintage pieces. How amazing. I am a collector myself. Lots and lots of character and charm. And if you like it, that is all that matters anyway, no matter what your friends say.
I think carving time in the summer to go through what you want and don't want, what you love and don't love, that could be so important for you! It would be helpful, likely, to get you closer to finding those spaces with less. So that you can breathe. Even if it is just one or two. 🩵
Alex, There are so many gems in this piece from the way incompleteness can lead to connection and also to more creative engagement. The dancing light beams remind me of the mirror of awareness, always changing but never reacting. I don't have a single thing on any walls in my four—room home. I guess that makes me perfectly incomplete!
I love the idea that our homes and our lives are both outward expressions of similar internal processes--where do we allow space, find patience in the liminal, open ourselves to possibility? I gravitate to people and spaces who/that are expansive, flexible, and truly living, and feel the contraction when things are too buttoned up.
(It seems to me that incomplete toys hold a similar allure to open spaces and incomplete maps--inviting kids to create their own worlds, their own meanings and possibilities.)
Thanks, Alex, another gorgeous piece. I feel so seen in all your work. I've lived in my home for seven years next week, and there isn't a single room that I could call 'finished', but I love how it's evolving all the time. Like me, I suppose. No longer waiting for the 'forever job', but at last, actually living. Enjoy your new home and your wall painted in possibility x
I love this. (And it's scary!) I think it's tricky because there's a great goodness in completion - in the sense of something being fulfilled. I guess it's the difference between completion as a goal in itself and completion as 'the ending that allows a new beginning'. One is stagnant and one is part of a living process. Thank you.
"I guess it's the difference between completion as a goal in itself and completion as 'the ending that allows a new beginning'. One is stagnant and one is part of a living process."
I really love, Susie, how you processed this. Truly. I think it is brilliant that you see one as a living process and one as stagnant. I would not have thought about it in those terms. Thank you for sharing that! I will be reflecting on that! 🩵
This concept provides freedom from pre-conceived notions of what something should be or look like. It definitely leaves room for improvisation and creativity. I love it! Thank you for this. Love, Virg
Thank you, Virg! Improv and creativity are so so important to our happiness and fulfillment. And how doesn’t love a little, maybe rebellion, in the process 🩵
I love that you have orange furniture too!
That was an accidental purchase, and I don't regret it. I so so love that couch.
we have two orange couches in our house. both second hand.
"When are you going to put something there?" with the gentle subversion, "When the wall tells me what it wants to be."
For years I hung no curtains at my windows and no pictures on my walls.
Curtains are still minimal to non existent in my house in the woods. Why would I want to shut the beautiful outdoors out?
The walls have slowly filled with family grown art work.
A few pieces from my husbands grandfather.
I lot of pieces from my artistic sister.
A circular poem one of daughter's wrote.
The two last puzzles my daughter (Sheila) that died put together. One filled with butterflies--her favorite flying insect. Another with a young dark-haired girl, sitting next to a sheltie that looked like ours when she was a young dark-haired girl.
I waited for the walls and windows to tell me what they wanted.
"I waited for the walls and windows to tell me what they wanted."
So beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing this beautiful wisdom with us. 🩵
I'm only halfway through your article, and I just have to comment about this. The incompleteness of a home space is also about giving the home the ability to be a living breathing space. It needs to be adaptable, mutable, changeable, adjustable.
Just like the toys with missing parts (brilliant tidbit there...I want to read that research), a home with unfinished spaces allows for the imagination to grow, for the home to evolve to the ever-changing and ever-growing needs of its inhabitants.
Just yesterday, we took four chairs and two lamps out to the garage. pieces that no longer fit my style or needs. The bright orange high back queen's chair that had all the character but never quite fit the space. The "stately" lamps that Hobbit never loved and that were too muted for the colorful space. But in the time I got them, they worked. I've changed since then. And so off they go, to be picked up by the organization that lets people coming out of homelessness shop for furniture and household goods for free. Each one, leaving an empty space where they once sat. and that empty space giving my imagination room to figure out who and what style I am now.
and, like rearranging the books on the shelf by color, and then rearranging them again by subject matter...or by just letting them land on the shelves that are most accessible for the thing that they are...they serve different functions in different spaces and also have the ability to mutate, change, adapt, and morph into new beings.
I love your work Alex. You inspire so much about my world, not just my reading, but my world.
Oh, thank you for sharing this. I love the example that you set in your comment. And I love where donate your household goods. What an incredible cause! 🩵
I wonder, how would the world change if we allowed ourselves to do the same as you share? When we give ourselves the space to be "adaptable, mutable, changeable, adjustable?" I bet our world would be so much happier and healthier. I believe that we all would be happier and healthier.
Alex, I love the way you described your grandparents’ home. Having space helps with that adaptability. Without some room to move in our house/yard, literally and figuratively, I feel like we’d lose the flexibility and coziness that has made us want to stay here even as our lives have changed drastically. Thanks for encouraging me to keep those spaces free and available for whatever comes next!
It's a lesson I keep learning. Leave something free so that I can fill it with whatever comes! Rather than fill everything to the brim. It goes back to an article you wrote a while ago about it being okay for us to learn the lesson over and over again - we learn variations of it, and we are more prepared each time, right? :)
Right! Forgot I talked about that. ;) I think the variations of the lessons are what create such interest and richness in our lives. They’re the fine lines we keep adding to the bold outline strokes that sketch out “the lessons,” and they make the drawing of our lives so much more beautiful. We can enjoy adding the lines by leaving space in our lives, and it’s that just a fun paradox?!
I’m really beginning to think that paradoxes are fun. Haha!
"Communing with drywall" - love this 😂 Each time I've moved, it's taken quite a while to put things on blank walls. I wait for the space to tell me what it wants, so I guess, without realizing, I also have been communing with drywall. Glad to hear I'm not the only one. 😉
Haha, I think "communing with drywall" is an important step in our move. We just didn't know it 😂
Wonderful wrangling with a very challenging reality of emptiness and possibility. As a dancer who grew up in large empty movement studios I have always wanted such a space in my everyday home life. The home I have lived in for 12 years now basically worked on me for the first few years to empty my living room, which has a lovely old wooden floor, and just leave it that way. This is my favorite room in my house! I have to walk thru it to get to the bedrooms so it is well traveled. My piano now lives there along with a lovely stained glass window we hung in the east window to catch the morning sun. Otherwise it has remained “empty” and it soothes my body and soul every time I am in it or moving thru it! Thanks for this empty space wisdom!🙏🏼💃🏽
Hi CathyAnn, thanks for sharing! Oh, I bet you'd want a space in your home like that! Do you ever just dance through that room occasionally and lose yourself in the memory? Oh, those beautiful dance floors - I love the spaciousness they have. I'm so glad that you can experience that every time you walk through your room, on that old wooden floor, with a piano, and a stained glass window. Ahhhhhhhh. Beautiful 🩵
Wow, Alex, as usual, I have so much to say. You always give me a wealth of information to think about and reflect upon. Here's the first line that caught me: "It's an intuitive resistance to premature closure." I think about emptiness a lot--both literally and as an existential metaphor. The thing is, I share a home with six other humans, so truthfully, there are no blank walls or spaces. In fact, my kiddos struggle with executive functioning, so their spaces tend to be cluttered and disorganized.
That's hard for me. I want to stand in a room where I can stare at a blank wall and allow that to settle in my thoughts. I want to have literal space in my home where I feel I can breathe, where it's not claustrophobic to walk around something or through something else. It takes an immense amount of effort and energy on my part to keep our shared living spaces tidy, clean, and organized.
So I'm focusing today on what your words mean to me in a metaphorical sense, too. I especially felt a sigh of relief settle upon me with your bulleted suggestions/ideas at the end of your reflection, because it was almost like I needed someone to say directly, "You don't have to be an interior designer. Your living space can be a natural reflection of who you are and where you are in your life."
Thank you.
I guess, because I actually have two friends who are certified interior designers and another who constantly tells me about some new, trendy upgrade to her home, I have somehow felt embarrassed that our house is a hodgepodge of reused and vintage furniture and decor--much of which originated from Ben's mom, who is an antiques dealer and collector. I actually LIKE having old pieces with unique stories in our home, because they have character. I'd rather that than think I need to keep up a Better Homes & Gardens-type living space. That's too much pressure.
All this to say, I am thinking more and more about carving time (maybe over the summer?) to carefully go through each room in our house and decide what I love and therefore what to keep, versus what can be donated if it's gently used but has no real aesthetic meaning for me (and Ben). Your posts lately have got me thinking about that. Thanks, friend! See you on Zoom Thursday.
First - I LOVE that you have so many antiques and vintage pieces. How amazing. I am a collector myself. Lots and lots of character and charm. And if you like it, that is all that matters anyway, no matter what your friends say.
I think carving time in the summer to go through what you want and don't want, what you love and don't love, that could be so important for you! It would be helpful, likely, to get you closer to finding those spaces with less. So that you can breathe. Even if it is just one or two. 🩵
I can't wait to see you tomorrow!
When everything’s done…….everything is done !!!!
EXACTLY! 🩵
Alex, There are so many gems in this piece from the way incompleteness can lead to connection and also to more creative engagement. The dancing light beams remind me of the mirror of awareness, always changing but never reacting. I don't have a single thing on any walls in my four—room home. I guess that makes me perfectly incomplete!
Love that you can sit with the tension of gloriously empty space.
I love the idea that our homes and our lives are both outward expressions of similar internal processes--where do we allow space, find patience in the liminal, open ourselves to possibility? I gravitate to people and spaces who/that are expansive, flexible, and truly living, and feel the contraction when things are too buttoned up.
(It seems to me that incomplete toys hold a similar allure to open spaces and incomplete maps--inviting kids to create their own worlds, their own meanings and possibilities.)
Thanks, Alex, another gorgeous piece. I feel so seen in all your work. I've lived in my home for seven years next week, and there isn't a single room that I could call 'finished', but I love how it's evolving all the time. Like me, I suppose. No longer waiting for the 'forever job', but at last, actually living. Enjoy your new home and your wall painted in possibility x