The Happy Home

I’ve gotten a kick out of the book above. The subtitle is The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Home that Brings You Joy.

The six chapters are Uplift, Calm, Energize, Comfort, Empower, Express.

What I’ve believed is that a person can transform a drab space or a not-ideal living arrangement into a wondrous haven with a little art-felt ingenuity and creative decorating.

A person who lives in a room in a halfway house can hang a poster on the wall with Command hooks.

Ways exist to brighten your abode and boost your happiness living in it.

In a coming blog entry, I will talk about Christine Platt’s newsletter. She is the author of The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living on Less. Her new forthcoming book is Less is Liberation.

As said, I think that livening up your home can turn it from boring to buoyant with a little simple and not costly tweaks.

For years I’ve studied and practiced feng shui. Using feng shui guidelines in our homes we can attract abundance. Generating good fortune not with money more than anything else but with health and wellbeing.

Why settle for less. Like Marie Kondo attested in her book Kurashi at Home: Organize Your Space and Create Your Ideal Life. She wrote that you’re not limited in how you express yourself in challenging quarters like a 350 sq. ft. apartment.

The Happy Home book gives readers questions to write down answers to about your ideal living space and aspects in your space today that disrupt your ease and harmony.

With guidance for creating a home that instills joy.

Sometimes a tiny act can spark a right-then improvement. Like simply arranging objects atop your desktop in a neat and tidy way. Banishing the items you kept on the desk and keeping only za few items remaining.

Simply rearranging something like this can give cheer. I’m a fan too of removing items from view that clutter up surfaces and storing them out of view.

For instance: I took magnets and other small objects off the desktop.

I would say that clutter is an insidious force that can cause us to feel miserable not only about our homes. It can erode how we feel about ourselves and our prospects in life.

I’ll end here by saying that organization is a form of self-care by design. Forget the cleanses and bubble baths and other influencer-peddled forms of self-care that aren’t really effective in improving our health long-term.

If those forms of self-care had any real lasting benefits Americans would not be getting ill with diabetes heart disease and other issues like we are today.

Tidying up is one of the best forms of self-care that I know of. It works to give us self-confidence and a spring in our step.

Now that it’s spring I say let’s tackle a tidying project or two.

Creating Our Ideal Lives

Marie Kondo was at it again with the book above that she published one year ago.

Kurashi is Japanese for “way of life” or “lifestyle.”

The way you live in your home can enable you to achieve your ideal life. Marie Kondo said that after doing the work her clients often were happy in their current home and stayed there. Or were able to move into their dream home a couple of years later.

Toying with using the word ideal has been hard. Then I realized that the ideal life is an authentic life. In this regard it IS possible to live your ideal life when you’re true to who you are and what your purpose is.

Each of us can thrive when we find our “kurashi” at home where we can be our authentic selves (and have beloved books on the shelves).

A tidying tip I recommend is to line up the spines of books right to the edge of the bookshelf. Refrain from placing objects in front of books. Presto–instant order joy and calm.

My intuition tells me that when we don’t like our living space it’s because we’re out of sync with ourselves.

Even in a bedroom in a halfway house a person can decorate with a poster of The Cure or listen to music or buy a colorful bedspread. We can make our homes our own wherever we live at any time in our life.

Right after turning 58 I started to embark on a new routine with atomic habits.

Was it the start of drinking water or the burst of spring cleaning that gave me more energy. On an odyssey I’ve been to create my own sustainable “kurashi” at home as I near 60.

In the new Marie Kondo book she has worksheets you can photocopy to write on to plan your day.

More in future blog entries about how I–a real person not a celebrity–changed her life for the better.