Housekeeping the Peace

Fresh Idea to keep your peace during the pandemic.

“Home is where the heart is”, they say. People decorate their home according to what brings them peace. What brings us peace changes seasonally, and some people redecorate their homes each season. What brings us peace changes with the times, and older people can attest that they decorated their home quite differently now than back in the 70’s. It is perfectly normal for trends in interior decorating, architecture, and general home making to change for reasons such as this.

Home is a place of peace. The things we find there are the things that give us peace. Our families, our friends that come to visit, and our prized possessions are all wrapped up in our fondest memories, and many of those memories take place in the home. We decorate the common areas of our homes according to the people we entertain there, and the ways we entertain ourselves. We decorate our bedrooms based on what brings us the required Zen for good sleep. We decorate our home offices to limit distraction and provide the comfort to focus and work the required hours to get the job done. All these decorating ideas produce an outcome of which we can be at peace with.

When we could leave our homes and go anyplace we’d like, the home shared the burden of maintaining our complex peace of mind with the world around us. At the office, we found peace in how we setup our work area. At lunch time, we went to eat at our favorite restaurants, shared meals and conversations with our favorite coworkers, or made a quick pit stop to our favorite coffee shop. Frankly, the act of or some factor surrounding the things we do regularly give us peace of mind, and it can be very disruptive to one’s peace of mind to stop doing these things abruptly, as though placed on house arrest. You go through mental withdrawals. Your mind misses things, and so does your body. Some people are really struggling mentally, because they cannot go to the gym. Others really needed church on Sunday, and the atmosphere and people of the congregation gave them the peace of mind they needed to handle the stresses of their week.

For those of us creative enough to reorganize our homes to save money or who can financially afford to redecorate, we should do so for the sake of our mental health. Now that we’re home and cannot go out to places we love, do the activities we love, with the people we love, it is now time to rethink our home decor. To re-tool our homes for our peace during the pandemic. Because what brings us peace has changed hasn’t it?

Clutter adds a different type of stress, so the directive isn’t to just go out and buy a bunch of things to bring your favorite places from the outside to the inside, though that is an option. The point is, the role our homes play in our life is, for the moment, changed, so we must be creative in effort to bring the peace the outside world gives us into our homes. Basically, setting our homes up for success to, once again, be our place of peace. We don’t have to think so literally about this either, because sometimes it isn’t the place as much as it is the “vibe” of the place. We just have to take a real good look at how we lived our lives before this, to better understand what we’re missing about life before social distancing, and come up with a creative solution for what we miss the most about the outside world. If what we miss is eating lunch with coworkers, we should be setting up virtual lunch session so we can still chat or gossip with “the crew”. And for the record, every High School should be planning a virtual Prom Night, if they’re not already. This pandemic could start a host of new trends and become a cultural phenomenon of its own; a cultural phenomenon that we could use to unite us in a way that we never thought possible because we didn’t appreciate each other until we lost each other.