wintering at home
Over the years, I’ve spoken to scores of people about the ins and the outs of their home life. Of all the things I discovered, about we feel about the time we spend at home, this was the most powerful. Much as we love being at home, we fear spending long spells there. We fear the unmeetable demands of housekeeping, all those tasks that, try as we might, we never tick off. But just as much, we fear the emotional needs that arise when we’re alone, the longings that even perpetual busyness can’t mask. We fear our lost dreams, unopened cupboards and if only’s, and the general feeling of not being up to the challenge of a fully rounded home life.
Thankfully, hope springs eternal. And every day we get another shot at making our home life work. What I’ve come to realise, through talking with others, is that the biggest challenge we face at home is emotional rather than practical. Ultimately, our happiness and contentment at home comes down to how well we hold space for ourselves when we’re there. On the face of it, the idea of holding space doesn’t make sense. After all, space defies being held. And yet we do just this. We keep everything together, defying gravity, in a way that allows everyone who is touched by this quality to feel that daily life is doable and that goodness will out. The ways in which we hold space, for ourselves and others, is the invisible, golden thread, touching on magic, that inspires, prompts and credits all our domestic efforts. It’s the love, care and energy that keeps us on track, looking forward not down, and that picks us up and guides us back when we slip. It’s what our parents did instinctively for us, when we were kids, and that to the degree we feel at home in our skin, we do for ourselves.
Once we accept that the Fairy Godmother is only real in the fairytale, we can either seek out someone else to inspire us and be dependent on, for ever more, or we can find ways to sustain this quality, this capacity, within ourselves. In all my conversations, I didn’t speak to anyone who expressed themselves creatively at home who didn’t possess this spark.
Throughout these conversations, I learned scores of smaller things that have eased my home life. Here are some, selected with winter in mind.
Interiors
One of the comments that struck me, I think because I heard it from three different people, was that their mother hadn’t ‘owned’ the space that she lived in. These people had mothers who arranged the living room according to convention, according to how she thought it should look, rather than as she might have liked it. Of course, aesthetic questions are complex and, within a family, there are often clashes of taste and preferences to contend with. Still, to be able express yourself, through furnishings and the arrangement of spaces, seems to me a fundamental freedom.
In line with this, various people described shaking up their home, now and again, to keep its energy alive and to stop it getting set in its ways. Familiar spaces and objects need to be re-presented, made less familiar, to prevent them from blurring into ‘how things are’. This leads to a conundrum I met again and again, that lies at the heart of home life for many of us. We want our home to look familiar and cosy, but we also want it to excite and inspire us. As in other intimate relationships, and without owning the paradox, we want our home to be both familiar and unfamiliar, a warm hug and a pleasing surprise.
A number of people had found a few ways around this, this wanting things to look fresh and yet lived in. Just as many of us put away our summer clothes in winter, to make space in the wardrobe for heavier pieces, they did something similar with their living spaces. As the sun lowered overhead, they ‘wintered’ their home, switching out rugs, pictures and blankets for ones in darker, softer materials than those they brought out when the sun shone bright.
Another hint I picked up, from a designer I spoke to, was this. When you get restless and want to change the look of your home, or even one room in it, think about it when you’re away from home. Being away from home gives you a perspective that you can’t have when you’re living in the spaces that you seek to change, when objects in it take on more weight, more stickiness, than when the front door is locked behind you. Through slow osmosis, we get beholden to objects in a way that makes us feel, when it comes time to parting ways, that we’re abandoning them and betraying our memories of living amidst them.
You can’t talk to scores of people about their home without the subject of decluttering coming up. My conclusion on decluttering is this. The appeal we feel for streamlined spaces isn’t just about living with fewer things. It’s that when we arrange our home minimally, when we put things away once and lose one thing when we bring a new one home, we free up energy for things we care about more than household stuff that trips up our attention and requires maintenance.
A craft of one’s own
When darkness falls early, in the winter months, a surprising number of people welcomed the extended cover of darkness, seeing it as an invitation to take up activities that sparked them from within. They used winter to practice a craft.
Most of us spend a lot of time and energy resisting housekeeping tasks. This is why it’s vital that we ring-fence time and energy for creative activities that we can slip into without friction, that we like doing for their own sake. And yet, so often we don’t do this. Why not? I think it’s because being creative is a discipline which, until it’s habit, a normal pocket of our day, doesn’t come naturally. Like every other practice, it requires effort and guile to overcome the hump that presents itself, as if from nowhere, when the chance to do something that we feel like doing at home, as opposed to must do, opens up.
It’s my hunch, an after-effect of these conversations, that we each have a responsibility to keep our creative spark alive. Just as eating well, connecting with others and exercising regularly are key to living well, so too is being creative. Even if we’re lucky enough to be out hiking trails well into our 70s, if we’re to round out our life, and to keep the light in our eyes, we need inside hobbies, crafts and passions that are ours alone.
If you drill down, craft is a form of mindfulness with something to show for it. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what this craft is, just that it is. Once we find an activity that gives us what one woman described as ‘that special feeling of fullness’, we know we’ve tapped into this part of ourselves.
The role of creativity, for most of us, isn’t to make great art. It’s to take us out of ourselves and to engage our hands, mind and heart in a way that releases the stress hormones that build up in our brains during the course of an ordinary day. Of course, creativity offers more than this. It isn’t just a neurological flush-out. Being creative feeds our soul, grounds us, makes us curious and encourages us to ask undefensively, ‘What’s next?’
Any creative activity that engages us in the doing (when your hands are busy, your mind is free), leaves us feeling lighter, the better for having done it. One person I spoke to derived this feeling from making lino prints, another from reading cookbooks in the sun, and another from planning her next holiday.Over time, as we change, the activities which give us this feeling change too.
Kitchen
Numerous people spoke in glowing terms of the Hygge moments in their lives. The idea behind Hygge isn’t just about candles and a crackling fire, though these help. It means having the emotional and imaginative wherewithal to offer others what you might like them to offer you, in a loving way, which is as humanly simple an impulse as it gets.
If only being in the kitchen, and cooking for others, were this simple. In our honest moments, most of the people I chatted to admitted feeling ambivalent about cooking, even for loved ones. We want to do it. But we also want not to have to bother. We fantasise about meals with friends around long tables, but when it comes to inviting them, we baulk. We hang back, waiting for that special occasion which, being a fantasy, never arrives. God knows, we have better things to do than stuff mushrooms and polish glasses. Even so, our longings to connect with friends around the table remains. Besides which, at the end of the day, we all must eat.
The advice I found most compelling on this came from a woman who insisted that you don’t need a special occasion to invite friends over. Your friends will, she insisted, be pleased just to have been asked. They won’t expect, might even be embarrassed by, elaborate dishes. One piece of advice I now follow was from a food-loving builder, who said that he focused on cooking tonight’s meal, and only that, making it ‘the best it can possibly be. Not’, he added, ‘the best ever. Just bloody good’.
Another thing I discovered, came from a woman who laughed with embarrassment at the satisfaction that she gets from clearing out her pantry. And yet, thinking about it after we chatted, I realised that clearing out the pantry (or kitchen cupboards), is never just about clearing out the pantry. It’s a chance to catch up with, and reconcile ourselves with, where we find ourselves in the present. Sifting through jars and packets, and peering at use-by dates, helps us to accept, with a jolt, that however months or years have slipped through our fingers since we last bought fresh cumin.
Another piece advice I was given, by a chef who does all the cooking for his family, was to prepare something towards dinner ahead of time. Because, as he pointed out, once your blood sugar dips, and dinner-time looms, you’ll be glad of having done so.
One last kitchen tip. If you and your partner pull in different directions, when it comes to cooking dinner, with one of you opting to prepare ahead and the other choosing to leave cooking till later, with one of you following recipes and the other cooking on the fly, try sitting down and planning your meals a week ahead. This, I was told on good authority, cuts down on stress and waste, and brings new dishes into your repertoire.
Gardening
During the cold months, lots of people talked about growing from seed and cuttings. Even if it was just garlic cloves, hiding pointy side down thumb deep in soil, and sprouting while they slept, they liked having proof for their soul of the spring to come.
Just as some of us peel off our work clothes on arriving home, to signal a threshold, a boundary, from one persona to another, a number of people I spoke to use clothing as a way of switching from one mode of being to another. Gardeners kept old boots by the back door, so as to get their hands in the soil more quickly. Crafters changed into comfy clothes and put the kettle on. However this shift was signaled, through music and hot drinks, the manner in which people held space for themselves often echoed what their parents did for them when they were young, to ease them into the zone, into losing track of time and themselves.
This brings me full circle. The winter months are darker and colder than the summer months. This is their beauty. Winter daylight is precious and not to be squandered indoors. And in the evening, atmosphere is all.
In Katherine May’s rich and perceptive book Wintering, she writes about embracing what the cold has to teach us, both welcome and unwelcome, and the value of not shielding ourselves from it. Enchantment is her lovely sequel, a few sentences from which I’m closing with here because they capture some of what winter can bring with it:
“Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring.”