Interiors and exteriors.
I spent hours the other day hanging pictures.
We did not just move in. We’ve been here for years. We did not just paint.
And yet, here we were, sorting through pictures ordered and developed years previous. Dusting off frames. Measuring and re-measuring, holding frame, hammer, nail, level and pencil all simultaneously (with hands, lips, knees and ear, obviously…).
It was as if we declared once again that yes, we do in fact live here.
My wife likes to snicker at me with my notepad, pencil, tape measure and level. This is serious work. What she could (literally – if I would allow it) bang off in mere minutes will be conceptualized, eyeballed, measured, re-evaluated and probably adjusted in an hour or so by myself.
And so, a couple of questions (asking for a friend):
If your door is frequently open towards a room, do you measure from the open door to the far wall, or measure from wall to wall to find your mid point?
If you are hanging curtains on both the window and the closet, and the closet is significantly lower than the window, do you hang the rod at the same level, or the same distance from the top of each respective height?
If you are creating a collage of photos, do you have equal spaces between all frames? How is this even possible once you start introducing different sizes? What do you do with decorative items than have no rectangular shape?
Perhaps these are the questions that have kept our walls bare for years.
There is a short story by Sherman Alexie that I ran across in university that came back to me this week. It was about a couple that fought regularly. Their fights were epic. Screaming, shoving, hitting matches. And lamp throwing. Regularly the protagonist or his girlfriend would throw a lamp against the wall and smash the bulb. After each fight they would pick up the lamp, replace the smashed bulb inside. Until the next fight. And the next. A few paragraphs later the couple just stopped replacing the bulbs. They lived and fought in darkness.
Which has had me thinking about the ways we give up. Stop replacing bulbs. Accept that the next fight, the next lamp throwing as inevitable. And thinking about years with empty walls and no curtains up. And that spot in the bathroom where I used the wrong paint, and never found the right one. And the paint that’s peeled off the handles in the kitchen. And the stair where the moulding ripped off, and it’s still off, hidden away in the closet for when I finally take it to the store to color match it’s replacement.
Of course, these are all just aesthetics.
But what if they’re not?
That’s the discomforting assertion of the latest chapter in a book I’ve been reading. That our exteriors are a reflection of our interior. That as we are mindless and unfocused in ourselves, our houses and workspaces will be cluttered, neglected.
To be fair, certainly I’ve been busy.
Certainly I spend most days just trying to regain some semblance of balance from work.
Certainly trying to keep a clean a floor with a large dog and three kids is like our own personal sand mandala ritual.
Certainly I spend enough time in the evening just packing lunches and cleaning dishes and wiping counters and handles, let alone repaint them.
But still… when years have past with empty walls and broken stairs and off coloured and worn off paint… When years have passed and you still haven’t changed the bulb. You have to ask yourself why.
The problem of course, is that once you accept that exteriors are a reflection of your interior, it’s easy to feel like you are left with a to-do list. Maybe you start on the exterior. Time to bring out the paints and repaint that wall. Time to bring that long neglected piece of stair molding to the store.
But you are an integrated being. And if our exteriors are reflections of our interiors, then it is not just the walls that need decoration, or the stairs that need repairing, or the bathroom wall that needs painting. It’s also the overflowing cutlery drawer. And that corner of the room downstairs that barely contains everything you don’t know what to do with. And your desk covered in half finished projects, old textbooks, and that mug (and whiskey glass) that you didn’t bring up from the last time.
When you really come to wrestle with the notion that your exteriors reflect your interiors, you’re left with the life work of organizing the chaos of your internal life.
And if, hypothetically speaking, you find the prospect of hanging a mismatched collection of frames on a wall daunting, then organizing your interior life may just make you want to lay down in the fetal position. That to-do list is crushing. And you may not even know where to start.
…
Okay. It’s me. Maybe it’s you, too.
I uncurl from the fetal position in my mind. I say the following to myself (but it is for you as well if you need it).
You are an integrated person. We all arrive at this moment through different paths. Some of our interiors are more cluttered than others. So be it. This is your interior, no one else’s. Accept this moment. The cluttered chaos inside you is still your own. And the clutter is only one part of your interior. You are so much more than simply the parts you’d change.
Accept that a life’s work may just take a lifetime. It might be enough (for now) to see this. To look at it soberly, but without judgement. Maybe this awareness helps in the moment you feel pulled in ten thousand directions internally. There is no easy fix for the way we are. But it is still good. We can desire change without hating who we are in this present moment.
There is work to do, certainly.
Breathing. Quieting your mind. Affirming who you are, acknowledging that which we are thankful for, as well as that which we want to improve. None of those things will hang those pictures, or paint that bathroom, or fix that stair.
But it might just eek out a little peace. Clear away a small corner of our hectic and anxious thoughts. Set aside a bit of the clutter internally, even if just for a little while. If our externals mirror our internals, it’s as good a place as any to start.
And maybe, just maybe, it frees you up to hang one more methodically placed picture on the wall.
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