What motivates you to make change?
Seeing an achievable goal is what does it for me. I spend ten minutes looking at Design Sponge or a House Tour on Apartment Therapy and suddenly I am looking around wondering how I can make something in my home look like a corner of a featured home. It's not a design element or piece of furniture that does makes me want to adjust things here, but perhaps a loose familiarity with what I see and how it makes me feel. The life I could be living if only my kitchen were arranged just so or if the couch looked out of the window instead of into the dining room.
For those who don't like to do this kind of thing, my nesting habits may seem over the top. Still, no matter how many times I move things around, it always seems to be better, if only because it's different.
Sometimes what motivates is a need to clear a congested part of my space, where things were sent temporarily and then sat untouched while six months passed. The satisfaction from clearing that area out and making decisions about that stuff is more than enough to get me off the couch.
I think it's constitutional. I've been intensively affected by my immediate environment since I was a teenager. Perhaps earlier, but I have no recollection of the years before I would move things around in my bedroom, painting dressers and adorning walls, placing my mattress on the floor and sending the frame to our overstuffed garage.
It's not unlike reading a wonderful piece of fiction and wanting to write or browsing a new cookbook and feeling the urge to get into the kitchen. They are all small pearly dreams come true. These little pearls can be strung together and, dare I say it, make for a pretty happy existence. For how lucky am I, are we all, to find these bit of joy here and there.
If this all sounds familiar and you are able to high five a kindred spirit in your head, then by all means let us mentally high five. But if these activities seem confounding and a waste of time then perhaps you are in need of a stiffer kind of motivation. Something I could write in the Getting Motivated: Part Two post where I sing a convincing ditty that makes even the die hard non-organizing and non-nesting type get up and do it once and for all.
It's a challenge, but one that I welcome. So for all you non-nesty types, meet me there, I will think up a great to do list and powerful supportive argument for why your home should evolve to suit you and ways to get off your rear end and get it done.
