My 3 part To Do list has been a work in progress lately. While it was listed as #3 on my list, it’s certainly the most important one for me right now: restoring balance and health.
Earlier this week I had another one of my bathtub epiphanies when I considered an old saying ‘As within, so without. As above, so below.’ This is one of the seven principal of Hermes Trismegistus.
I guess it’s similar to the principal of what you think, you become. What goes on in your head manifests in the details of your life. Well, lately my head has been complete chaos with my carefully laid plans being shot to pieces; this has definitely shown up in the details of my life. Everything around me feels cluttered. My body is off the reservation with no note on when it’s expected back. No matter how much I clear away the clutter, it comes back and brings all its buddies with it. It has felt like the clutter is just oozing out the walls while I sleep.
If I want to bring order to my life, I need to restore order within. So that has been the work-in-progress over the past few days. It means looking for wisdom in those who have done this before. Why reinvent the wheel when there are so many others who’ve already figured it out? An article I read recently suggested moving books out of the bedroom because the energy in words keeps your brain active, making it harder to sleep.
While that sounds like New Age malarky to many, I figured why not? So the bookshelf got moved to the living room. I slept like the dead the night I did that and every night since.
Cooking needs to be part of the road to balance for me. I love food and I need to find a way to include it in my life in a way that benefits rather than harms me. That means the kitchen needs to be a haven for me, not a war on clutter. I have a tiny kitchen but a LOT of cooking stuff and all the spices to go with that.
A trip to IKEA for spice bottles, office supplies, a label maker, hanging baskets and a bigger bookshelf solved pretty much every kitchen storage issue I had. The bigger bookshelf meant I could put all my regular books in one place. That freed up the little bookshelf in front of my kitchen to be used for all the recipe books stashed in the kitchen cupboard. Freeing up an extra cupboard in the kitchen means clutter on the counters finally found a new home out of sight.
Getting hanging baskets that fit onto my pantry shelves doubled up the pantry space, making it look tidier instead of disorganised clutter. Everything is now neatly grouped, stacked and easily accessible. I even made space for a new cast iron Dutch oven for stove to oven cooking.
For less than $100 I have doubled my kitchen storage and restored order in a small space. Not to mention my living room looks more pulled together and the turquoise bookshelf goes really well with the sand-coloured sofa. I’ve always loved a beach/ocean colour scheme of blues, creams and browns. There might not be an ocean within 800 miles of this place but I can have the colour scheme!
I’ve lived in this apartment for almost 2 years and I’ve always treated it as a temporary stopping point. I’ve never put effort into making it a haven for myself and then wondered why I never felt home here. There’s no way of knowing if I’ll ever get back to Scotland; I haven’t given up. In the meantime I am here so it’s time I ‘lived’ here.
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