Calm in the chaos
Margaret Olley, Yellow Interior (1989)
There’s a certain mental freedom - so powerful it almost feels like a physical freedom - to having an ordered home.
I see people - sometimes I go to their houses, I read about them, I see them depicted on TV - who live in creative chaos. Family members, friends, neighbours, pets, art, food, and all the trappings of a life lived in abundance race and chatter and laugh and love from room to room in their homes, leaving behind them a trail of noise and joy and the rough and tumble of life lived in utter creativity and spontaneity.
How do they do it? What secrets do they hold, that open the doors to creativity from chaos?
Have you ever had a glimpse of the late artist Margaret Olley’s house? I’ve seen photographs, and of course, she painted a lot of interiors, and it’s an absolute, fabulous, mess! There’s stuff everywhere. I’m not going to deny her home is wonderful to look at: the rooms almost feel alive, as though she was just - only a second ago! - there beside the window. And all over the tables, chairs, sideboards, floors and walls are all the wonderful, colourful, intimate detritus of life that made her paintings so alive and so special.
A recreation of a room in Margaret Olley’s house
Margaret Olley’s dining room (2011)
I can’t do it. For me, productive creativity comes from a place of calm. Of emptiness, even. Of quiet, and stillness, and the absence of clutter.
Of course, I’ve had to learn to compromise. We have children, pets, jobs, and are planning our renovation: our home is most often busy and cluttered, and my deadlines don’t stop just because the house is a mess. But when it is clean - oh! - it’s as though a burden I hadn’t known I was carrying has been lifted from my shoulders.
Is any of this familiar to you? Am I alone?
And when life itself begins to crowd in, to feel cluttered and chaotic and out of control, for me, that’s when the cleaning starts. My children have become wary of a certain look I get in my eye, and everyone metaphorically (or perhaps physically) takes an uneasy step backwards. “Oh no, she’s got her Cleaning Face on again.” It’s a kind of instinctive reaction I have to feeling out of control: what’s one thing I can control? The way the cereal boxes line up in the pantry, that’s what.
Well, life is feeling more than a little chaotic right now. We are hurtling towards the end of the year at breakneck speed: I’m in the final weeks of teaching Let it Grow, my Tangle & Fern clients are busy needing Christmas sales content and trying to wind up projects we’ve been working on, Meals in the Mail is snowballing with joyful abandon, the children’s school seems to have a new excursion/concert/fete/fundraiser on every second day, and I’m fairly sure that all the social and professional engagements that were cancelled during the past two-and-a-half years have all been crammed into the three months from October to December this year.
Margaret Olley, The Blue Kitchen (1993)
And at precisely five o’clock yesterday afternoon, it all became too much.
I closed my computer, went into the kitchen, and started pulling things out of the ‘fridge and putting them onto the kitchen bench. And I didn’t stop until quarter-to-one in the morning. By the time I finally climbed into bed, the ‘fridge was gleaming, the food neatly sorted and stored, and our pantry (which previously resembled Monica’s secret closet) was ordered to within an inch of its life.
The thing about our pantry is that it’s built like a tall, shallow wardrobe. Utterly impractical. Several of the shelves are above my eye-line, and can’t even be reached at the back by my blind, groping hand as I try to figure out what’s in there. (The kitchen renovation starts in February).
My husband definitely does not help the pantry situation. For some unfathomable reason, he loves to visit the supermarket, and shops as though we are hosting the Under 15s football team daily (as opposed to the reality, which is two adults who eat out too often, and two small and somewhat picky children). This, despite the fact that he doesn’t actually cook.
Every weekend I beg him not to go shopping, and every Saturday he heads to the supermarket and returns home laden with bulging shopping bags, saying, “It’s just a few essentials.”
Last night, as I tidied and sorted into the wee hours, I found in that pantry:
15.92kg of sugar, in various colours and forms
5 packets of panko breadcrumbs
2kg pearl couscous
5 boxes of powdered cocoa
6 boxes of muesli bars (mostly the ones the kids won’t eat)
407 Twinings English Breakfast teabags
(I mean, he wasn’t entirely over-reaching with the teabags).
And when I got up this morning, despite definitely not having had enough sleep, I felt freer. I kept opening the ‘fridge and pantry just to look at all that lovely order, and it made me smile. I felt so free, so calm, I was even inspired to start writing again, and to dust off this friendly old blog.
Hit me with your best shot, Silly Season. I’m ready.
