A Simple Normality
In the Dining Room, Painting by Berthe Morisot
I looked back to my dining space. The imprint of luxuriously hyped-up time was shouting back at me. I could still hear the car sounds and chatting, echoing from the car parking lot. Our guests were going back. Today we had a blast; after almost two years, a large get-together made us emotional and excessively fun-filled. The hall-area was like a playful giant. The cushions were floating down on the floor; my guitar lay down on the top of the cabinet shelf; the candle stand was dropping off the wax on the coaster; the sofa moved a little away from its usual space and created a relaxed tilted position for itself; and the entire dining table looked like the collector of the world’s crockery items. A glass was hanging from the bottle cap quite like a trapeze artist and the hall smelled like the backyard of any restaurant—queer and quite kitchenette. My mother picked the glass first. Our house-help started collecting the dishes one by one. And I was arranging the cushions. Only one corner looked extremely well-behaved. A Sansevieria (Snake plant) stood unbothered, as if snobbishly looking at others. I opened a cabinet drawer and picked up the ‘Marine’ scented candle. I lit that up and placed it a little away from the plant. They both looked exquisite. The hall was slowly getting cleaned. It was tough to come back to normal silence. But our rewind mode was on.
We often see the hustling struggle to get back to normal routine after a tour or party. It’s normal to take time but unfortunately we do not have the ‘normality’ in our schedules. We rush, and we leave the untidiness back in the place for the ‘later’ time. And the ‘later’ time does not come easily because we are never really free. But by the end of the day, if we start putting the items back in their destined ‘home’ the whole house can get in a resting mode to give us a next productive day. A ‘home’ for the items will be like the place where they belong, like a fork should go back to the kitchen and a laptop should go back to the desk. Personally, in our home, we maintain a strict arrangement to prioritize ‘the tidiness’. That day we were tired and exhausted, but we fixed the mess at least at a glance, just to put the items back to their homes so that our hall did not look messy before the day called off. But on the next day, if we saw the entire derangement, we would push back either our work schedule or continue to do our work in that messiness. Along with that perhaps we could have felt the last day’s fun as a burden. Our emotional fulfilment could have been lost in that entire house-mess.
It has been proven that if we keep our surroundings clean, we think well and work with added positivity. Cleaning up the space does not only offer us photogenic flawlessness; rather it is the best way to give the mind a swift start for the next working hours. I recently read Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. This book adds something important to our lives. I feel this expression is the most powerful one, “when you put your house in order, you put your affairs and your past in order, too.”
I call that attention Ina*. I feel the little organised habit clears the fog of the mind; it guards the mind from unnecessary clumsiness, and it also welcomes a simple normality in our days. A mindful look at our homes can bring back the lost calmness that we search for in our moments.
(*In Sanskrit, Ina (इन).—a. means determined or anything that is powerful.)