88

My favorite instrument is the piano.  I always wanted to play, but it never came to me.  It might have something to do with my brain/hand connection because I never learned to type either.  I just sit here pecking out anything I write using 4 of my 10 fingers.  My son has the gift.  He teaches himself songs from YouTube and when he jams out improv-style he sounds like a composer. I’m jealous.  I have to get my fix watching Philip Glass videos on You Tube instead.

The piano has 88 keys.  Did you know that?  Two infinity signs flipped on their end.  I went to a dance festival awhile back with friends and we all bought friendship bracelets.  Another friend pointed out the symbol on it and what it meant to her. Then I realized they were eights.  That’s the beauty of the things that we are drawn to.  The meaning keeps revealing itself to us over time.  It’s not stagnant and it’s something that only we can understand as the beholder.  Over time the meaning can change, get richer, add layers.

Throwback to middle school: woven friendship bracelets.

Over the past more-than-a-decade, I have conducted billions of reconciliations. The beauty of a financial reconciliation is that you can (hypothetically) always get to zero.  It’s very satisfying.  If you can’t, you have to dig in and figure out why. I once sat on a call for 45 minutes with a very diligent account who was determined to find the root of a $3 difference.  It was intense.  But we found it.  She was really good at her job.

Creating a house is a massive reconciliation process.  What do you want to keep?  What doesn’t work for you anymore?  Will this support you in the next phase that you are stepping into?  Is it tied to a valuable memory?  Do you find it beautiful?  Is it time to let it go? The end goal: creating a space that you love.  A space that reflects one of the eights: Love.  You can’t reconcile love.  It’s unreconcilable.  You can only express it through art and beauty.  The other 8?  Grief.  You can’t reconcile that either as much as we would all love to.  So, there you have 8 and 8 standing next to each other.  The two things that will always be outstanding on the balance sheet once you are done with your life reconciliation.    

That’s the beauty of creating a home.  You can express the unreconcilable.  The art picks up where the logical mind leaves off.  Infusing your home with everything that you love and hold dear in a visual manifesto.  Why?  Because we are human beings and that’s what we do.  It doesn’t matter where you live or how much money you have, decorating your home with the things that have meaning is universal. 

I saw it when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer living in a community of subsistence farmers.  Living in a limited-cash economy did not stymie the importance and joy of decorating the home.  Living that experience stripped down to drawing water from a well and bathing in a stream showed me so much about what is universal to all of us regardless of where we live. Interior design is not something we do only when we have money to spare. It's something we do regardless.

That’s why I feel myself railing internally when I hear interior design described as a “luxury business” because to me it’s not. There’s nothing frivolous or unnecessary about it. It’s a fundamental part of living this human experience. It's an essential.

One of my favorite people from my Peace Corps site, Tia Ino.