Tao of Decorating

Last week I started decorating, or rather preparing to decorate, what will be our bedroom. It was our bedroom when we first came here and then we swapped around and it became the 'recreation' room with telly, futon, overflowing book cases, books piled up on the floor and for a while the computer and its entourage as well! Now we're swapping around again.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of stuff to move and find temporary homes for. It took ages and the demon impatience made an early appearance. It always appears during the preparation stage. I want to get the scraping and filling and sanding and washing down and all those other jobs that seem to take up more time than the painting and papering done as quickly as possible so I can get on with the tasks that start to make things look better than worse. Mind you I want those done pretty quickly too so that I can see the finished job. I don't cheat on the preparatory stage though. That's because another bigger, more terrifying demon, the need for perfection, lies sleeping and will awake at the first brush stroke. So I struggle on impatiently, resenting all the time spent on preparation.

At the moment I am paper stripping. I've never known such difficult paper to remove. The walls are covered with wood chip which has been painted. The wood chip has been here longer than we have and it isn't going without a fight. Either the original paste or paint or a reaction between the two has given the paper a water resistant property. This means that steam and water isn't helping much. The heat from the steamer does soften the paint allowing the paint to be peeled off. This takes the surface of the wood chip with it. What's left can then be more easily removed with the help of the steam. Progress is painfully slow, barely a square yard every half hour, and exhausting. And the demon frustration joins with impatience.

I admire the work of Alan Watts. When we were in Italy in May Charmane Landing, another of Diane's students, gave me her copy of The Meaning of Happiness. I finally got around to start reading it a couple of weeks ago. I reached the chapter entitled The Return of the Gods around the time impatience arrived. In it Alan Watts talks about acceptance. As I chip away at the wall covering it occurs to me that the cosmos is giving me ample opportunity to practice acceptance.

When frustration arises rather than trying to fight it I give it my attention, allowing it to be and actively encouraging it to be as frustrated as it can. Amazingly I then feel less frustrated. I feel that I have put down a burden and I become happier in my work. The same thing happens when I accept the impatience. Watts' explanation is that by accepting the demon I am accepting its independence of the ego and so experience psychological relief. In his words "the conscious ego has divested itself of the unnecessary and impertinent responsibility of thinking it essential to direct and interfere with all that goes on around it."