I love how during the darkest time of the year there are tulips with their many colors to enjoy. In a bouquet I recently bought were these cuties, don’t remember seeing this so often, little tulips growing from the stem. Somehow this flower also makes me to think about the Tulip mania in the Netherlands back in the 17th century. A luxury item and a status symbol back then which caused an economic bubble. Perhaps this is a proper picture to start this text. How history can teach us its lessons, but also comforts. This is how we are.
One of the sentences I wrote in one of the texts last week was: “You don’t find the word enough in the jungle”. This was one of the treasures for myself in my writing. This was one of the things I didn’t know I know, it was the mapping that brought it into the light. And this thought as a starting point we get nicely to a book I’ve lately been reading about the many different faces of ourselves by Katriina Järvinen (a Finnish social psychologist, anthropologist and psychotherapist). Or did I get lost in the jungle again? Anyway, here we change from the difficult parts of humanity into the embarrassing parts :-). To those moments when you hide yourself into the bathroom in an attempt to try to hide from yourself :-). And how it bugs me that it just never works.
This book called for baking an apple pie, and to eat it with a double portion of vanilla sauce. Since I learned some ugly truths about myself, I had to "sugar coat" them ;-). And please, you are welcome to take a slice if you feel like it, unfortunately I can only offer a virtual one.
When I got to the page 145 in the book following sentence hit me right in my face: “An easy way to make a future me is to buy stuff for it”. Then I looked around in my new home (lot of it is self-made, not only bought though). Yet that sentence still makes me to want to go back to the bathroom when writing these lines - even though the chapter ended to the notion that we are like Windows-updates, we can just leave the previous versions of ourselves behind. Perhaps I was also ready to hear those words because a few days before when looking around at home I realized that I don’t need this anymore. When making this home I just partly had to come to a closure with something within. I think it is a good place in life when you notice that you don’t need something anymore. You feel that you are enough, leave it and go forward. I almost called to Fida (a Finnish charity organization), just come and take everything, but no. I didn’t do that.
When writing this text, I spotted the purse in the picture below in the local shopping center. I obviously had to buy it too - just for the sake of the picture ;-). And then we add some linen, a yarn ball and a flower/flowers in the picture. Ah, here we go, now it is my style. This is the group I want to belong to. Perhaps there is a thought in the picture though, let us look the same thing from a different point of view. And how I wrote previously how our homes can support us to be the best versions of ourselves. Be better towards others. And some of us also work at home and teach online from home.
I don't know what to write under this picture, perhaps a quote I saw on Pinterest: "Oh darling, go buy a personality".
I guess I am not alone in this, trying to buy a new me, especially when we are at the beginning of a new year and new goals on our mind. And don’t we all have some clothes or hobby related things in the closet for the future perfect me to come out of there. For example I used to be a member in a hobby book club sometimes in 2005-2007 and every month a craft related book came home. Of course I forgot to return in time most of the books so I got to buy myself a collection of craft books. I didn’t make much myself back then, but a few years later the craft bug bit more severely so then I got to use my library :-). So the future me was just a few years too early manifesting itself materialistically.
And I don’t know if it is too bad if you sometimes go from outside in, when you seek some emotional support from things/clothes for whatever it is you want to change in your life. You do that in order to start to see yourself in a different way. Perhaps it is only a problem if those new versions, our potential, end up in the closet for good and we never take them in use. Perhaps those things then stay there and constantly remind us that we are not enough? Perhaps it also is someone else’s potential we try to imitate in order to measure up and we think that that is the way we are supposed to be?
I don't know what to say under this picture either, "mentally stable as an Ikea-table" perhaps?
I hope I can come out of the bathroom now. It is emotions and belonging we always buy.
The year of the beauty of imperfection/enough is clearly giving its lessons. I just better participate.
This text is also a part of something I have been thinking of for a longer time with the year of gentle living and everything. What do I think about the consumption, what kind of a consumer am I? And therefore, the bigger question, what kind of a maker am I? What are my values behind making? So therefore this endless thinking ;-).
From the inside out, from the outside in = tools to make us reach our full potential?
Pirjo ;-)
Ps. Just when I got this post finished, I noticed this news in Finnish at www.yle.fi.
Ps. Ps. From the outside in: There is an adjective mustasukkainen=blacksocked meaning jealous in Finnish. I at least have some black socks in my closet. Therefore I have sometimes been wondering and joking that what if I go and change all my black socks into sparkling socks or pink or white or whatever. Would it be that simple to become a better person :-) ? At least these colourful socks give joy and happiness to everyday life. These are socks I bought from Copenhagen in the Fall, they seemed to be trending there. I don't know if my theory works in practice, but by now there is probably no jealousy left in Denmark if trendy socks are used and not left in the closet, only hygge and lykke (=happiness).
Ps. Ps. Ps.
