WHERE YOU LIVE

Describe yourself. You're sitting at a lunch with a new friend or colleague and you’re asked to share who you are. Not how you look, that part is obvious. Not what you do, or who you know, or what you like… 

Using only adjectives, describe yourself. Go ahead. I’ll wait because this is just so important. Notice the words you use. Do they define the you from your childhood, the one who was fueled by wonder and curiosity? Or, are they a snapshot of the you who has been impacted, altered, manipulated by what’s going on in your life now?

The study of who I am, innately, has become a lifeline for me in this season of rapid change—There are things going on that cause a physiological response. Toxins going in produces toxins coming out. Sometimes I am angry, or at least my body is angry, and it needs a way of releasing all the excess. But is angry how I would describe myself?

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I imagine diving off the long board perched at the end of the dock. Will I have the strength to swim to shore once I’ve taken the plunge? I’m uncertain of what lies ahead, but is “uncertain” the person I am? 

There are things going on physically that make it [sometimes] difficult to recognize myself—a bald head is a wake-up call that all of ‘this’ is real. I am anxious at times. But is “fearful” a defining aspect of the enduring me?

Temporary. I am fascinated with how we abuse this word and I talk about it in my writings a lot. We tell ourselves the condition of our lives [our hearts] is only for a little while. Yet, even as we dismiss the signs that our current disposition may be more permanent than we are willing to admit, patterns are burrowing inroads into the mind-pathways of our most promising tomorrows, and the things we let in become us, change us, even alter us at a cellular level.

In my work, I am invited into your homes. There, I hear your stories—your frustrations and your heartaches, your hopes deferred and dreams discarded, your confusion and the inundation of distractions cannibalizing your best intentions. 

Without words, our sanctuaries describe who we are. They are an indictment, a revelation of what we have let in, what we covet, what we allow. 

This is why peeling back the layers that exist within you [your first sanctuary] is far more important than stripping away wallpaper or tearing up the floors.  

Real design describes you. It is the visual manifestation of a soul, not in a season, but as it truly is.  It is a language that speaks without words.

It’s easy to excuse away the clutter, believing it will take care of itself somehow. But a home in chronic state of visual chaos is evidence of unsettled issues of the heart and mind…yours…and a family’s shared experience. 

This “noisy house” is not one playing the cadence and rhythm of a soothing song. It is one that raids the spaces within where contemplation and self-reflection should reside. 

Ask your children to describe themselves. Do they know who they are in a world of chronic exterior stimulation? “Who are you, little one, whose measurement of self is as finite as the short distance between eyes and hand-held device.” The asking is redundant. Who they see themselves to be is evidenced in how they live. But ask anyway. And ask again.  

Do the external manifestations of how you live tell an accurate story of who you really are?  What’s inside of you shows up in how you live.  How do you want to live?

Describe yourself.

BRINGING OUT THE BEST IN PLACE ALWAYS AND FOREVER BRINGS OUT THE BEST IN THE PEOPLE WHO DWELL WITHIN

—Janene Kraft

 THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
 
 Be mindful of what you deem “temporary,” and be clear about how long temporary is. 
 Be aware of who you really are. Not the responding you. But the resonate you. 
 Find that ‘you.’ Rediscover that ‘you.’ 
 Make the necessary changes to cultivate and reawaken that ‘you.”
 Describe yourself. Let’s start there.