Dear friend,
If your home or your life doesn’t feel beautiful today — this newsletter is for you. Stay here and rest for a moment. I’m going to share with you how to make it feel beautiful. Spoiler: it doesn’t involve buying anything.
I understand this letter will hit each reader in a different moment and mood, but know that even if you aren’t feeling up to the tasks at hand, you have a place here at the table. And as luck would have it, my letter to you today has nothing to do with doing more.
At this stage of our life, thick in the jungle of raising our children, it feels as if a full calendar and overflowing trash can are the only pieces that come easy. Time to nurture relationships, intentionality seeking out experiences, and a sense of peace feel rare…
…much like a clean floor or a free Friday morning.
But to build a beautiful life and home, it is both laboring hard and letting go of what no longer serves you.
Cultivating takes both catching and releasing.
I could easily tell you to rework your schedule, buy some new organizing bins, or spend the day catching up on laundry. I could give you pointers about how to build a more beautiful home. I could share Pinterest boards and fill your Amazon cart endlessly with products that promise to solve it all.
But instead, I’ll offer you this: if your home/life/status-update doesn’t feel lovely right now, here’s what to do immediately…
Move The Goalposts
This past weekend, I shared a conversation with my sister over a gin&juice — her and her family have been looking to purchase a bigger home for the past few years and so I often ask for updates on their search endeavors.
“Change of plans,” she explained. “Instead of moving and spending all that money on a larger house, we’ve decided instead to stay put. Our house isn’t fancy, but it’s fine. Instead, we will save all the money that we would have spent on a bigger house and take all the vacations we’d hoped to take with the kids while they’re young.”
In other words: trading what we want for what we really want.
This is essentially moving the goalposts in our favor. Now, instead of lamenting her home’s minimal storage or aging kitchen, she sees days spent at the beach and Universal Studios.
In many ways, she has been liberated. As if the burden of the situation has been lifted and replaced by something far better.
Moving the goalposts means just that — resetting the goal. In my sister’s case, the goal of a nicer, newer home came with a wad of responsibilities and headaches. It required her to do a lot, from searching for houses to financing paperwork to carrying the constant mental load of change.
Instead, after resetting the goalposts, she put a few vacations on the books without the burden or guilt of the finances. She decided to learn to garden and began planting vegetables in her backyard. She planned out a few small adjustments that would make life in their home more comfortable and fitting for the season ahead.
She changed her goals and the result was more balance, more lasting experiences, more of their priorities, and more peace of mind.
Perhaps it feels a bit as if I am talking out both sides of my mouth: I’m constantly stressing the importance of a tidy, well-kept, beautiful home. I do a lot in my home to keep it as such. I am not underplaying the power that comes from a physically beautiful, clean space.
But…
We can make our homes all the more peaceful and beautiful by switching, ever so slightly, our internal narrative around our homes. We can see their imperfections not as flaws, but as opt-ins to better choices. This means that small, crusty cottages and little apartments can be seen as great victories in life. It means that heavily-used, shared bathrooms can be the norm and linoleum can be your flex.
It means that you have the freedom to set your priorities for your family and your home.
Friend,
what do you desperately want to say YES to in your life?
Perhaps this can become your new narrative: “I say no to (blank) so that I can say yes to (blank).”
Change Your Mind
Our lives and our homes can feel more beautiful to us today. I’m talking about helping our minds see our lives in a new light. I know, I know, it’s easier said than done, but hear me out.
I’ve yet to meet a woman who doesn’t want to curate a beautiful life, actively building and putting pieces in place as she labors and grows her vision; from her shade of lipstick to her workout routine to her breakfast plate. We are builders of life.
It is inevitable — we were created to create.
As we talked about last week, our internal narrative is powerful. Take note of your internal narrative around your home/life/current status — what is it saying?
Perhaps it’s say something like mine:
“I’ll be able to relax better at home when,” “once we have more money, I’m going to,” “maybe I should buy…”
Let’s change that thinking.
Maybe it’s the fact that I’m turning 40 next month, but I’m beginning to find myself so impossibly uninterested in spending life moaning about what I want to be different.
The constant striving of my 30s to perfect, grow, achieve has morphed into wanting to rest in what we’ve done. I want to feel, really feel, contentment. I want to spend time enjoying what we have grown and have some time to sit and appreciate it without constant projects or interruptions.
I want to cook spaghetti in my kitchen without thinking about the pieces of broken tile.
Last week, after a bit of a supper snafu in which half the tray of stuffed peppers sat in a cold oven, Stuart and I found ourselves eating much later than the rest of the family. It was a beautiful night, complete with birdsong and a sunset, and so we ventured outdoors to eat our supper on the picnic tables that overlook the pool. It was quite idyllic. We shared a glass of wine, listened to the kids chat away in the hammocks tucked way up into the oak tree, and chatted about our summer plans.
The reality of our al fresco dining was that we’re still fighting to clear up the water of our Amazon pop-up pool after winter, the landscaping is currently nothing but black plastic being held in place by rocks, and the picnic tables warped in the summer heat and are no longer level enough to hold a plate.
From this vantage point I can see the roof lost some shingles over the winter, the boys stuck stickers to their bedroom window again, and our “lawn” (which consists of no less than twelve varieties of weeds and very little grass) needs to be mowed terribly.
I should feel like I need to strive to whip all this into shape. Thirty-year-old Shaye would have.
But I don’t. At least not immediately.
It will get done in its own way, as time and money allow. It will play second fiddle to having friends over for supper, finishing out the school year well, and taking the month of September to be in Italy.
Vacuumed stairs give way to family movie night.
Dusting gives way to cooking something special.
It’s not that these aren’t valuable pieces of cultivating a beautiful home, but it’s that they are far superior when held in harmony with the rest of our actual life. These are meant to be blessings to a home’s inhabitants, not burdens to lash ourselves with throughout the day.
In our seventeen years of married life, Stuart and I have invested a lot of time and effort into building what we see as a beautiful life. Our budgets may not always be perfectly balanced, nor our toilets always scrubbed, but none-the-less if you were to visit our home, you would see a home of deep intention.
And a home of priority.
Time together, time at the table, time outdoors, and capacity to travel are ours.
What are yours?
Love,
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