At the end of our week, when all the furniture had been returned to its usual place and our new kitchen floor was looking …well, new, I sat down and thought through the idealistic and innocent views I once had concerning renovation. I vowed to abandon any future wishes of making the house anything other than what it already is-an old house with crooked walls and bouncy floors.
It was on the last day, when I was cleaning and putting things back in place that I saw something that made me think. With exhaustion, I slumped into my favourite chair by the back window and I turned to look at the cupboard standing beside me. It’s a chest of drawers made from pine ply wood. The joinery is exposed and the grain of the wood is golden and smooth. For weeks, while we have been fixing the kitchen floor I have wondered what sort of kitchen cupboards I would like. We had played around with the idea of ply rather than chipboard and avoiding the flat pack or glossy white surfaces. Sometimes we don’t know where our preferences come from or how our ideas just appear. When I sat down and saw the chest of drawers, I realized where our ideas had been sitting all along. The things we see every day, the colours and surfaces, shapes and images that surround us, actually do have an impact on us. These things stay in our minds; they sit inside our heads and re surface when they please. I honestly had no idea that this was true until the moment I sat on my chair and saw that chest of drawers beside me. I make my work with the belief that what we use every day has an impact on our thoughts and life. It’s the knowledge of this that I didn’t possess and it’s the reason why it surprised me so much.
Last week we watched a Ted talk by Amy Cuddy about the idea that you really can fake it until you make it. If you act confident, you will become confident. If you smile, you will feel that smile eventually and be that happy person. If you just sit for 2 minutes every day in a power position, which is leaning back in your chair, feet up on the desk and your arms stretched out and resting behind your head, you will eventually be that person with the power. You can fake it until you make it but more than that you can become it. I see the correlation between this and the shapes around us, the images and colours that live with us influence us, just as the things we tell ourselves influence the outcomes of actions and behaviour in our lives. Things, objects, thoughts, even posture, impact our decisions. How we arrive at an idea or alter our preferences towards one thing rather than another is because of what we hear in our thoughts and see with our eyes.
Our view of the world is a reflection of the things we surround ourselves with.