Mindfulness (or: I'm Fifty! Days Into Homeownership)
The plumbing is fixed, the kitchen is still ugly, and I have a list of 147 projects on my phone. This week I tried something new: not doing all of them at once.
Mindfulness has become one of those words that's printed on mugs, but the core idea is simple and very useful for anyone living inside a renovation: pay attention to what's in front of you, right now, without immediately judging it.
The renovation brain spiral
You know the one. You go to hang a towel bar and notice the drywall is cracked. Then you notice the trim is chipped. Then you're on your phone pricing tile at 11 p.m. and wondering if you should have bought a condo. That spiral is where joy goes to die.
What's actually helping
- One project at a time. It goes on the list, it gets a date, and I'm allowed to stop thinking about it until then.
- Five minutes of noticing. Each morning I sit with coffee and look at one room. Not to fix it, just to notice what I like. (Spoiler: the light in our living room is amazing.)
- Celebrate small wins. We fixed a drain! We hung a frame! Those count.
Our mascot: Sally O'Malley
If you've never seen Molly Shannon's Sally O'Malley on SNL, go find it. "I'm fifty! I like to kick, stretch, and kick!" She's fifty, she's in red stretch pants, and she is having the time of her life. That's the energy we're bringing to this house. We're not perfect, the house isn't perfect, but we're going to kick, stretch, and kick anyway.
So here's to being present in a half-finished house. Breathe in. Breathe out. Ignore the cracked drywall for one more day.
