My routine lately has been to get up, grab my cup of coffee and enjoy it on the couch. Do the Wordle of the day and then on to the Quordle… If you don’t know what Quordle is, I can best describe it as Wordle on steroids with a higher element of frustration. But I enjoy them both.

Then I plod off to our basement, to my creative space. This room is filled with bits and pieces, art and artifacts of my life. Little things that mean nothing by looking at them but that hold a lifetime of memories for me. The colours make me smile; the art is a reflection of what I love and what means so much to me. This space makes me happy.

In the middle looking out…

In the middle of the room is my desk. John and I bought it at a vintage shop in Vernon not long after we arrived here. It’s not big but it’s big enough for my purposes. Best part though, it has the coolest pull-out drawer/Lazy Suzan that I’m sure was designed in the Mad Men era for the person once occupying this desk to keep their whiskey. Neat. At the ready for mid-afternoon negotiations or to provide solace on a day gone badly.

Today, I keep a mickey of tequila in there for when I have a FaceTime with my youngest son. Tequila has evolved to be ‘our drink’ having made a couple of trips to Mexico and shuttled back multiple bottles for him in the height of his bartending days. Our sign off now regularly includes a shot; very short for me and regular for him. Judge as you may; it makes me smile now just thinking of it.

My desk is angled so I look out over our backyard towards the lake and mountains beyond. It’s a view that never disappoints, even on the foggy, cloudy days where it seems I’m looking out to nothing but greyness. I love it still. Our yard is steeply sloped so even though we have regular deer visitors, unless they come right up to the patio off the side of my room, I can’t see them. Happily, they very often do saunter right up to the door, looking at me with curiosity and disappointment; ‘why haven’t I filled the birdfeeder since they came and ate it all?’

Time for a change of perspective

But today I’ve decided to shake things up a bit. I’ll be swinging my desk around so I’ll be sitting at the widow looking into my room, not out. I decided to do this a few days ago and today feels like a good day to make the switch. Interestingly though, when I decided to move things around, I thought I was just doing it because that’s what I’ve always done. As soon as I was strong enough to move my furniture around in my bedroom growing up, I did. It was a pretty regular occurrence; at least once or twice a year I’d torment my mother with a day full of the sounds of furniture being dragged from one side of my small bedroom to the other. Bit by bit, inch by inch. It was a SMALL room.

It wasn’t until I looked at the photo that I took to accompany this post that I figured out why. Why was I so intent on making the change? All of the things I love are behind me. And that just won’t do. I want to feel immersed in the memories I cherish so much because each one ties itself back to a person I love, a time, a moment I shared with them. And I most definitely don’t believe all of my best memories are behind me. I have way too much more to do.

Someone, somewhere in Britain once said “a change is as good as a rest”; it may have been Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, maybe Sir Winston Churchill. I’m not sure who (and neither is the internet, from what I can tell) but I’ll going to test that theory today.

It’s time for a change of perspective.