“Revitalize your Home; Revitalize Yourself” is a lesson I learned over years as both an architect and a homemaker.
The following short story is an extract from a diary entry (/notes for my forthcoming book!) that I wrote while living with my husband in his home city of Hamburg, Germany.
I came across it recently, and realized that it perfectly illustrates how, by making just a few small, positive changes to your surroundings, you can change your entire outlook on life.
September 3rd
It was a chilly and windy Hamburg afternoon. I heard the doorbell ring.
“Sarah! Please, come in!”
My neighbor trudged in, looking a little sad. In fact, more than sad – she looked desperate.
We went into the kitchen together. Before Sarah had turned up, I had brewed fresh ginger tea with lemon in a clear teapot with a black handle. I poured it into two pristine white cups with silver gray rims. During that exchange, my friend and I felt the warmth of the home, the tea and our friendship.
“I feel like my life has stagnated,” Sarah wasted no time in telling me.
“I really need a change. Do you have any advice for me, Gabriela?”
I knew that Sarah had been feeling this way for quite a while. We had spoken about it many times in the past few weeks, but she had so far refused to pick up on my more subtle suggestions. On this occasion, I decided to take a more direct approach.
“Do you really want to know what I think, Sarah? Are you sure you want to hear it?”
She looked at me, a little bit surprised and nervous, as if getting ready for what I had to say.
“Yes, I am ready” she replied, after a pause.
“If you really want something in your life to change for the better, the first thing you have to do is revitalize your home. You need to change something in your immediate physical surroundings. For example, in which rooms do you and your family spend the most time in your home?
“Well, I suppose the kitchen and the living room.”
“Let’s focus on the living room. You certainly need to rearrange the furniture and fix some mistakes I have noticed.”
“But who will help me move everything?” Sarah protested. “And you know I don’t have the money to buy new furniture right now!”
“You don’t really need money,” I assured her. “And I can come help you with moving things around on two conditions: you need to promise not to take my advice personally, first of all, and, secondly, you have to be willing to try the changes I recommend.”
Sarah agreed, so we made a date there and then.
September 5th
Two days after Sarah had come over for tea, I walked to her house so that we could make a few changes to her living environment. Confident that Sarah would stick to her part of our agreement and not take offense, I pointed something out to her straight away:
“Sarah! How do you STILL have this cracked glass panel in the living room door?! It’s been like that for two years! Aren’t you depressed every time you see it?”
“I know, I know… to clarify: one of my kids shut the door and broke it. But we don’t have the money to replace it!”
“It doesn’t cost very much to replace it but, until you do, please remove it! It’s an interior door so there’s no practical need for it to be there.”
That said, I moved away from the living room door to look at the room’s furniture. An itemized list formed in my mind: One modern futon with thick, brown, removable upholstery with a rip in it. Two chairs: one black and one white. A couple of assorted small tables; one table lamp with a paper shade; one floor lamp with a chrome base and a black shade. A light pine TV unit and some ornaments.
Some of the furniture wouldn’t necessarily have been my choice but there was a quality that underpinned everything in the room: it was all to Sarah’s taste.
“I can work with these pieces,” I proclaimed. “But, above all, the first thing we need to do is fix the upholstery of the futon.”
“Do you know how much that costs?!”
I looked at Sarah and at the tattered-looking futon.
“Let’s turn the upholstery inside-out,” I was already doing it as I spoke. The back of the fabric was a golden mustard color, similar to the fall leaves I remembered so fondly from my travels to the North-East of the US.
Most importantly, though, the back of the fabric was in perfect condition. The new color even brightened up the room and became a focal point!
“Isn’t it weird to have the back facing the front?”
“Why? It’s in flawless condition and it has a lovely color.”
After that, it was time to move on.
“We can’t move the TV,” Sarah said as she followed my gaze. “The cables are hard to reconnect.”
“The TV can stay, but there are plenty of other items to move.”
Little by little, Sarah and I moved the sofa, chairs and tables to different parts of the room. We exchanged some tables with others. We took out some ornaments and put them in other rooms. Then, I went to other rooms in the house and picked a few items that I felt were a better fit for the new composition.
Lastly, we put some pots of flowers on the window sill.
Sarah was taken aback by the results.
“It doesn’t look like my living room anymore!” she declared.
“Well, it is. This is how you revitalize your home. When you honor your living room, you honor your life and the life of your family”.
Conclusion: Revitalize your Home; Revitalize Yourself
That episode stuck with me, because, only a few weeks later, Sarah made some decisions that started changing her life. In short, she began to go into the direction she had felt, for too long, that she needed to go. Was it that once she saw change was possible, she carried on changing?
I believe so, which is why I often offer the mantra “Revitalize your Home; Revitalize Yourself” to people I meet who feel like they’ve become stuck in a rut.
People in that position often think that changing their lives has to start with spending a lot of money. But, with Sarah, neither of us spent any money. In fact, once Sarah started to make a few more changes to her life, she actually started earning more!
Likewise, other people I have worked with have had similar results from this experience. Try it!
