serenity – Deborah Makarios

I am in search of visual peace. I did not realize this until I had spent an embarrassingly long time reading books about decluttering, orderliness, and interior design, and getting frustrated by how they weren’t helping me.

I don’t know about you, but I am not aiming for a specific number of personal possessions, and I have no particular desire to sort all my belongings into one of three to five piles, boxes, or bin bags. But I struggled to articulate what it was that I was looking for, until I eventually, by increasingly targeted blunderings, rediscovered the phrase “visual peace”.

The problem with most books I’ve read about improving the home environment is that they assume that once you’ve got rid of everything you don’t much like, you’re happy to keep looking at everything else. All the time. Forever.

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There is a serenity that comes with knitting socks. It doesn’t come with knitting large projects, nor with crocheting items large or small. It also, strangely enough, often doesn’t come with knitting socks, either.

The thing about socks is that they’re basically foot-shaped. As a foot is not a simple piece of architecture, neither can the sock intended for it be. And so, like most peaces in this life, the serenity of sock is not always easily come by.
As Stephanie Pearl-McPhee observes, “In the nineteenth century, knitting was prescribed to women as a cure for nervousness and hysteria. Many new knitters find this sort of hard to believe because, until you get good at it, knitting seems to cause those ailments.”

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Tag: serenity

Finding Visual Peace

Of Socks and Serenity