Loni Gray
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Musings - Ways to Thrive

by redefining HOME
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Earning our way into Being Apart

2/27/2021

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When do we go astray? What makes our thinking shift?

We often fledge from our family nests into shared places - a dorm, a Greek, a shared flat or rental house. 

Even after college, we begin our independent lives still rubbing shoulders with others who are at the same stage of their lives but not necessarily doing things the way our families did.  
And it's a very rich time. We meet others who do and think differently, and we learn and reflect on what of our childhoods we want to keep. 

We made choices, but in the midst of others. Our first move into independence happened collectively.

And for some, we inhabited those shared flats in the urban centers we were so drawn to for its energy and offerings. There is such deep warmth in the memories of those beginnings.

Why then do we begin to define happiness as achieving a place "of our own" alone?

I understand how it starts: When our earning power gets to a level where we can afford a bedroom with its own bathroom, or deck, of course we gladly take it. Then we crave a living room that's ours alone, so we can watch our own choice of shows, or shut the damned thing off altogether, make a mess and not have to accommodate anyone else's sense of neat or proper. We no longer have to isolate ourselves in the only room that is solely ours - a bedroom - to follow our own mood or make personal choices.

Because it first happens as we have money, do we begin to associate earning power, and the privacy it can afford us, with being better?  

Is Away really what we want however? Even in this time of Covid wariness? 
 
As we progressed up the ladder of success, there is also a cultural expectation that we move into more and more isolated living. Less influenced by new thoughts, and others’ ideas. More alone.

How bizarre.  Knowing that we've been our best and grow the most when we're with others, we’re expected to live alone. Isn't there a possibility of a hybrid that serves us better?

It may not actually be away that we want so much as more personal choice and more private elbow room. But within reach of others and their resources.

But what if the space we could retreat to was our own suite of rooms and porches? What if privacy was designed to be more than just the bit of space around our beds, and that "our space"  offered a place to sit, a place to work or read or do whatever we chose. What if privacy was intentional designed into our dwellings? Even from the spouses and ones we loved?

A design room just for me. Nice.


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December 21st, 2020

12/21/2020

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Have you noticed? 

Our dwellings are integrally entwined with our Rites of Passage, those events large and small that become embedded  as the distinct chapters of our lives.

When we choose, or when we are required to reassess our life's direction, we also tend to change where home is, and more importantly, what home is for us. 

-  We redefine it.

Think back. Remember that big move out to the first place? To college, the first apartment, a shift to a new city for a first job, or a marriage. We discovered not everyone did things the way our family did, so that move gave us permission to rethink how we wanted to do things....that move offered each of us our first choices as an independent adult. 

- Making choices about the physical space was as much a part of that step of becoming as the move itself.

But then too, redefining oneself by one's space happens at later moments. Maybe it happened with your first child. Was it pregnancy that raised new thoughts inside you about having your own home? And like me, did the things you did to your home become a part of defining how you were a parent? Did you envision that babe playing in a grassy backyard, or crawling across a different family room off your kitchen?

My downstairs laundry room became an art class for my own and my employee's daughters some time later. I transformed a utility space into an enrichment space. As it turned out, it became an unplanned employee perk as well. My colleague Julie told me having her kids with her at work after school just as she became a single parent was one of the most important things to her. So what happened in my space served as her Rite of Passage too - into single motherhood. Changing space is so powerful.

What about retirement? Without the kids, and the assorted educational systems that structured our life for decades, we finally get to choose our own rhythm and our own spaces. What did you want? Bigger, smaller, later, earlier, slower, quieter, more rural? You were making a statement about yourself at last.

And then, the loss of a love perhaps, like me:  "What do I want now that I'm alone?"

That takes time.

For me, with two younger children and an unfinished home on 10 acres, there were many choices I faced about my place. But even if your children are fledged, I think we all assess what we need from a place as a reflection of the new place we ourselves are emotionally entering:

Might it be the small escape to the sea to write as we live out our own final chapters? A place in the sun by a large window close to adult children and family, or a small urban aerie that's walking distance to the many things we want to do, once they're available to us again post-Covid? Perhaps it's re-configuring what we already have, a home we share and can be touched by others.

These big life changes always revolve around place. The scale of it, the feel of it, the environment around it. The life we want. We know it's important to reassess where and what our home should be in order to support the next step in our personal lives.

So what this boils down to in my mind then is that we can work this forward and not wait for some major force to make the choice for us. If we want a life direction change now, then we can make it happen by altering where we live, or how. 

But if no event is forcing the issue, then we've got to figure out what we want in order to make the house help take us there. We must clarify. Then we can redefine home as we see fit.

And that's the point.

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loni gray      loni@lonigray.com      510.508.7003       

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