A Peaceful Yom Kippur

(Not my art! Made with AI)

The Day of Atonement is a Jewish holiday in which religious people participate in various pagan atonement rituals that look like medieval witchcraft (seriously, look up the rooster one) and, since it's tradition not to drive at all, the secular crowd made it into bicycle day to make use of the empty roads. It's a very quiet day; when we only had one channel on TV here, that, too, would broadcast nothing - so the holiday was also the 'raid the movies rental' holiday. Nowadays we have internet so being bored with no TV isn't an issue, but the roads still empty, there's no music or any loud noises outside, and it lasts for a blissful period of 24 hours. I love it.

Having spent seven years living alone, I now really enjoy having people in the same house as me; the sounds of life happening so close, life I can dip into if I want, feels safe and helps me not get stuck in my own head. On the other hand, it also means constant interruptions which make the day feel disjointed. There's never a stretch of ten uninterrupted hours. You can see where this is going. 

Boyfriend's away to board game with friends until tomorrow. The kids are with their mum; it's just the cat and me. I found eleven hours of some nondescript, generic relaxed piano music and it's on now; the window's open, there's sunlight, the cat's making stupid sounds as it bathes, and everything... is so... peaceful. 

This room used to be a child's, and over the past year I gradually scraped the Little Mermaid stickers off the window (they were lovely, but I'm going for a simple white look, as it feels the most peaceful to me). There's a giant, built-in cabinet spanning the whole wall, which was half full of various clothes the boyfriend doesn't wear anymore, children's towels, vacation bags and all my stuff in a giant mess. 

I didn't have a lot of stuff when I moved here, on account of not having a lot of stuff when I returned from two years in Thailand, and because I don't like owning stuff anyway; but in June I got the inheritance and, having covered the debts and put the rest in a savings plan, I blew some 2000$ on... stuff. Some of it was classes (coaching, calligraphy), some was useful (a sewing machine), three printers (laser black and white one, one for tiny color photos and another for regular color photos), and the rest was crafting materials - mostly scrapbook supplies, markers, some threads and needles, a trove of washi tape and glittery stickers, and inconceivable amount of artificial flower. So I can change the feel in the room on a whim, like a child dreaming of living in a Disney movie.

That is to say, now my room is a mess. I shoved everything I could, without any thought, into the closet: bedsheets, my two coats and five dresses, hardware and kitchen utensils from my tiny place in the desert, now un-needed as boyfriend's place is well-equipped; It's more stuff than I owned in years, and since it's a free day I asked boyfriend to take everything out of the closet before he left. Now it's all in piles on the desk, floor and bed, which is step one in re-arranging a room. 

I used to work in arranging people's houses - not the internal design, but decluttering and making things orderly and reachable and comfy. I loved it; it's like healing, only for spaces instead of body parts. It's also maximizing storage space by good arranging, which I'm good at and enjoy. And now I have enough stuff to have to do that on my own living space, so here's what needs to be done:

1. Take everything out of everywhere - all the drawers and nooks, and empty it where you can see it.
2. Sort the whole thing into categories. While so doing, toss away as much as you can. Donate it or bin it, it doesn't matter.
3. Once everything's decluttered and categorized, we can see how big is each category, and assign the best sized available space for that, based on what needs to be most reachable. 
4. Rejoyce.

I'm supposed to be doing that today, but, as I was writing, I realized that this rare, quiet, uninterrupted time is too precious to spend on that. It's probably better to do that during the weekend when the kids are here and interruptions happen all the time; for now... perhaps it's time to finally practice some watercolor, which I've wanted to do for a while and never got around to, on account of not being very good with handling interruptions. If I know someone's coming in two hours, I won't have the peace of mind to do much during said two hours; very limiting, and while sometimes I manage to conquer it, more often than not I fail. Doctor recently told me it's common for us people with ADHD, which took away some of the guilt, but not the frustration. 

One day I'll write about how great it was to get my diagnosis, how much guilt it washed away and how many useful tools I could find now that I knew what the issue was; and how I wish I'd known about that when I was twelve. Life would have been different.

It's so peaceful; yes, it's water color time, I think.