ONE
Blueprint for a New Way of Living

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
--RUMI

What Are We Missing?

We are facing an enormous problem in our lives today. It's so big we can hardly see it, and it's right in our face all day, every day. We're all living too big lives, crammed from top to toe with activities, urgencies, and obligations that seem absolute. There's no time to take a breath, no time to look for the source of the problem. We are almost desperate for a solution. If we stop and consider what our lives would be like if things got much faster, we might feel overwhelmed by hopelessness and futility. We just don't have any more to give. We're at the end of our rope.

We need to remodel the way we are living, but not in a way that gives us more of the same kinds of space we already have; that would simply create an even bigger life. What we need is a remodeling that allows us to experience what's already here but to experience it differently, so that it delights us rather than drives us crazy.

Your life is a lot like the house you live in. It has some things that you like and some that you find irritating. It has rooms that are used constantly and others that you visit only once in a blue moon. It has features that need frequent maintenance and others that will last for decades without your attention. Almost all of us would engage in some remodeling of our house if we had the time and the money. In an ideal world all the shortcomings of our home would be remodeled to fit the way we'd like to live, with plenty of room for the things we hold most dear.

The real issue is that we want to feel at home both in our houses and in our lives, and we try to do this by tweaking the things we are aware of, the things we assume must be the problem, such as not enough space and not enough time. But some problems are less visible; they're about qualities rather than quantities, so they are more difficult to identify, articulate, and resolve. We can't create more of a sense of home if we don't understand where that feeling comes from. In your house, for example, if you feel upset every time you return home from work because you have to enter through the laundry room, pushing your way past baskets of clothes waiting to be washed, unfolded mounds of sheets and towels, and a miscellaneous trail of kids' coats and boots, you may require an architect to point out to you that yours is not a well-designed entry sequence. It's not the laundry itself that's the problem; it's that you have to pass through it to enter the house.

Our lives are just the same. We think the problem is our job or our boss or our child care arrangement or our spouse, and we keep trying to fix those things, only to find new frustrations popping up once we get free of the offending situation, making it impossible for us to feel at home in our lives. The problem isn't what we think it is. Like the process of identifying that it's the entry sequence that takes you through the laundry and not the laundry itself that's the problem, fixing the problems in our lives involves understanding what underlies these events. What's needed is a dramatic shift in perspective, and architecture and design provide remarkably useful metaphors for helping us to see what that shift might look like.

When you remodel a house, you don't need to change a lot of things in order to shift the character of the house, but you do need to evaluate what isn't working and...

 

The Not So Big Life by Sarah Susanka
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