Finding Flow

Our home as a place of give and take.

I haven’t posted in a bit for good reasons (living life), less good reasons (we keep getting sick), and writer reasons (what am I doing here again?).

I don’t always know where to start when writing about home because everything feels so connected. There’s a flow I’m trying to maintain. I am a Virgo who gets horny for the minutiae of home organization. So naturally I cleaned some stuff out this weekend. Some things went to the curb to be picked over by passerby, some re-discovered items were moved to places where they’d be more accessible or useful. Home optimization is one of my greatest joys.

In Feng Shui (which I am by no means an expert on), part of the understanding of flow is that you must make room for energy to come in and move around the room. By releasing the old (whether it’s an oversized piece of furniture, clutter, or the latest collection of dust bunnies) you make way for the new. In witchcraft and other metaphysical practices, you’ll find similar concepts of making space or containers. For example, an empty bowl might be left out to show you’re ready to receive.

I often spiral around my home in a seemingly aimless or frantic way, moving things, clearing things. While this can veer into compulsive perfectionist territory, I generally find it makes me feel better, almost like an active meditation. I’ve had to make peace with the fact that my home will never get to some perfect place, especially as someone with children. There’ll always be some wall that needs patching or some huge lego build still being played with. Everything’s in flux if the space is being truly used and enjoyed.

Joseph Campbell has some good quotes on perfection. Here’s one:

“Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat. Life lives on lives. Our own life lives on the acts of other people. If you are lifeworthy, you can take it.”

And so rather than perfection, my goal is balance.

Things are starting to feel more balanced since we moved into our home a couple years ago. We’ve dealt with a lot of the chaos and can get into more of the fine tuning. Peter is building a circular coffee table to improve the flow of our living room. The current one is too long and annoying to get around. It will go to my sister.

Our living room with too long a coffee table (though you can’t tell from this photo).

Beyond clutter, one aspect of my home that I cannot stop thinking about is color. It’s something I unconsciously weigh when I walk into a room. As a former art school kid, I love complementary colors. I was delighted this week when my kids started explaining complementary colors to me, unsolicited. My daughter said she likes them because “it’s like color, color, and then BAM, opposite color.” She gets it. The joy of contrast. She pointed to a painting I did awhile back. “I like how the snakes are opposites.” I’d never told her that was kind of the whole point of that painting.

My snake painting.

We’re lucky to live in a racially diverse neighborhood (though there’s a lot of inequity I can’t do justice to here). I’m glad my kids aren’t the racial majority at their school. Did you know that white kids are the most segregated group in American schools? Did you know that when schools are integrated it also benefits the white kids? It seems like that truth is often buried.

I feel like our culture promotes a lot of black and white thinking. Like the idea that giving and taking are binary acts through which only one side benefits. But those who’ve had great sex know that giving can be as pleasurable as receiving. It seems like a regular occurrence in Facebook Buy Nothing groups that the givers experience as much pleasure as those who receive.

Not only is it great to get rid of shit and witness the joy it brings others, but you never know when things’ll loop back around and you’ll be the one finding a free dresser on the sidewalk. Mutual aid is meant to be mutual. Ecosystems function when everyone is getting fed.

In my early twenties I fainted more than a couple times, mainly because I would forget to eat before standing for long stretches on a crowded train. When it first started happening, I would wait for the feeling of faintness to pass, not asking anyone for help. It wasn’t until I fainted into the opening subway doors and onto the platform, bloodying my head, that I acknowledged the need to ask someone for their seat at the onset of dizziness. And still, it was a struggle to speak up, to make someone move.

I’ve since learned to eat better (for the most part) but it goes against all my conditioning as a girl raised in the era of low rise jeans. Even now, if I tell another woman I’ve forgotten to eat, she’s likely to comment how jealous she is. She wishes she could forget to eat. We want to be smaller and need less.

While donating blood this week, that feeling of faintness came on again. I hoped it would go away, because my blood bag was almost full. But I was getting hot, breaking into a sweat. It’s hard not to panic when you feel faint. And panic once again led me to self-blame and the idea that I was inconveniencing people. But I assured myself that the staff would probably rather help me than discover me unconscious. I flagged down a phlebotomist who put an ice pack on my neck and elevated my feet. They were prepared for this. Did I briefly feel guilty about using up some of their ice packs? Yes. But it’s ok. Like the people getting my blood, I also have needs.

As a family of four, our home feels kind of like a mini community. And most rooms are multi-purpose. When we moved in, I was relieved to finally get my own office, the stuff of a pandemic parent’s wet dream. But my office quickly became another family room. The kids watch TV in there. It doubles as a guest room. And this week my sick daughter slept there so she could be closer to us in the event of night vomiting (spoiler alert: it happened).

The sick girl taking over my office.

This is fine because we’ve made room for flow. I recently asked my husband to build me a small desk for our bedroom. I didn’t want to feel resentful of guests taking over my space. And it felt like a waste of time kicking the kids out of the office when they’d littered it with stuffed animals and granola bar wrappers. I didn’t want to feel stuck or helpless in that inevitable flow of life. My husband complied, building me a way nicer desk than the plywood thing I was imagining.

As a mom or a woman, it can be hard to ask for things, to fill your own cup. But when I’m fed, physically, creatively, and otherwise, I have more energy to go to Costco and buy my family another million granola bars and then pick up the granola bar wrappers they’ve left on every single surface.

I feel like our family’s flow is expanding, evolving. Resourcing isn’t just about going to Costco and getting things. It’s also about remembering to eat all the frozen food you stocked up on at Costco because it’s cold outside and you don’t feel like going to the store, also you really should spend less on takeout this month, and plus you gotta make room for your next Costco haul.

Life is contrast. It’s up and down. Today I overheard my kids’ elementary school band playing “Lean on me.” I don’t need to tell you the lyrics. Some days you’re holding someone’s hair back while they puke, and the next you might be puking while someone rubs your back. There’s giving and getting. Red and green. Work and rest.

You might find yourself walking along through a capitalist hellscape when BAM someone reaches out with something you need.

I just hope you can try to keep your hands open. Because when you make room for yourself and your needs, when you’re planted in a container that’s able receive, that energy spirals back out onto those around you. Before you know it, you’re growing leaves, making oxygen, maybe even fruit. Whatever it is, someone out there might really need it.