Month: February 2018

When I applied to colleges, I applied to Tulane School of Architecture, a five year program. I was accepted. My best friend was accepted to Tulane and planned to attend. I on the other hand, got waitlisted at my first choice school which was in California. When I was accepted to Oxy, I really wanted to follow the Beach Boys out to the land of surf and sun. And, so I made a choice not to go to architecture school. While I don’t regret that choice, I still love architecture and design. I had a great experience in California and my life was changed by my encounter with the living God who I found wanted to have a relationship with me. For that reason alone, I made the right choice.
But lately I’ve been reflecting on my love of architecture and design. A friend recently invited me to a workshop about the psychology of design and the importance of our experience of place. As a result, I bought and read Toby Israel’s book, Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Environments. My daughter got her degree in interior design and is now a practicing junior designer. The university where I work has a consultant advising us on campus master planning and giving presentations about our needs for space. The confluence of all these things has me reconsidering my lifelong interest in architecture and design as a possible career path. When I look back over my adult life, all the coffee table books that I’ve purchased have to do with residential architecture and design.
In the mid-1990s, my father served as his own general contractor to build their dream retirement home. I spent six weeks that summer visiting my parents and enjoying the close up view of the construction process. Ever since, I’ve loved to walk through houses under construction. My years working for a custom yacht builder also developed my love of interior architecture and design. In 2004, we designed a custom house for our family and hired a design-builder to help us bring this dream to life. The result was fabulous and we enjoyed living in that house.
Now we live in a marvelous custom contemporary that is one-of-a-kind. And as I pursue graduate studies, I think again about studying architecture and design. I may be a perpetual student for life!

While serenity is closely linked to home, it is not exclusively found at home. But a home contributes a great deal to one’s sense of serenity. But at the same time, serenity is something you carry with you. Hopefully, you carry it with you most places, if not everywhere. But it takes practice, patience, and fortitude to take it with you every day and every place. For the moment you leave the sanctuary of your home, your personal space, you encounter people and situations that threaten your serenity (if not your sanity!).

But your serenity must not be based on reactions or provocations, for there will always be people and situations that vex and annoy. Serenity is a mindset; In order to live in serenity, you must choose to be at peace no matter the chaos around you. This takes practice and self-reflection. You must consider what things are triggers for stress in your life, and then you must consider how you might handle those people and situations differently. How might you approach them with a different attitude?

Of course, your serenity and your stress level often are mirror images of each other. So, serenity requires finding the margin in life to rest and rejuvenate, to de-stress. While there is no way to avoid stress in life, there are ways to manage it, to overcome it, and to learn to let it affect you less. And if this is possible, why not cultivate a better life through serenity and de-stressing?

I captured this somewhat blurry image as we drove over a bridge (don’t worry, I wasn’t driving). To me it is a metaphor for life. We were traveling fast and I was trying to hang on to the last moments of our trip. The sky and weather are always interesting in this place near the ocean. I am forever trying to capture sky, water, clouds, and pretty vistas with my phone camera. I stop for photos on every walk we take. But no matter how many photos I take, I can’t stop time. I can’t even slow down the pace of life for very long.

But taking photographs is my way of trying. And of pausing to remember and of pausing to truly see. I take photographs as a way of noticing. I’m intentional about stopping to see. I want to be present in the moment. Some would argue that I should just stop and enjoy the view and not photograph it. But photographs give me something to come back to, a way to extend the memory. They give me pleasure in the remembering.

But this particular photo wasn’t taken while stopping; it was taken at high speed in the middle of life. We were on our way to the next destination. Christmas was over in a blur and we had a plane to catch. We were on to the next thing, as we so often are in life. So the photo reminds me that life can be a blur if we are not careful to slow down and enjoy.

So, I’ll keep snapping photos to try to slow my life down. What will you do?