Calming effect

 

I live in a disorderly house. Not, I hasten to say, a house of ill-repute or brothel (in the way the two ideas were linked in the Very Olden Days). Just a house riddled with children and mess, the two being rather synonymous. I don’t think our house is much worse than any other house in which children lurk but the one thing it conspicuously lacks is an atmosphere of calm. And calm is something I frequently need.

So I’ve developed calming strategies. None of them involve stuffing myself into tight clothes and running on a machine. Or stuffing myself into tight clothes and running in the street. Or stuffing myself into tight clothes and spending most of my income at a gym.

Since my retirement from the paid workforce I no longer need to awake with the dawn. However, I still get up relatively early so I can perform my morning calming rituals in peace without small people buzzing around. These rituals involve multiple cups of tea and multiple games of Solitaire. If there are no grandchildren up, I may read a book but I have worked out that you need more calm to read than to play monotonous games of Solitaire.

Another calming ritual is cleaning or clearing out. Someone once said that you should make use “of the chinks of time”. I’ve interpreted this to mean those few minutes when you wait for the kettle to boil or wait for someone else to do something else (“go and clean your teeth and brush your hair”) or you’ve got ten minutes before you have to leave the house.

In these chinks of time you can, for instance, tidy a kitchen draw; this is a very satisfying activity and in not very much time, particularly if you drink as much tea as I do and multiply that with the number of minutes you have the kettle on the boil, you can have the whole kitchen drawer problem sorted in no time.

Other kitchen activity which can be “chinked” (I hope you love my neologism) includes sweeping the floor, a quick clean of the microwave, wiping out one kitchen shelf at a time and wiping down the cupboard fronts in sequence. A little pause here for a Grumpy Grandma gripe. The cupboard faces in our kitchen are not only white, the paint is slightly textured and there is double beading on all four sides of each cupboard face which attracts a great deal of dirt and dust. What could have possessed the builders of this house to condemn the kitchen cleaner to constantly having to clean the cupboard faces? Given that most kitchen cleaning is done by women and most builders are men, then our builders must have hated their wives.

The key to all this kitchen activity is that you set a goal which is easily achievable. By the time you finish the task you feel fine.

There is, however, another calming thing to do in the kitchen which takes a long time but is even more satisfying. You book a date with your grocery store cupboard/s to clean and rearrange. This is extraordinarily soothing in process and you feel so satisfied when it’s done. No really, take my word for it. I once spent a blissful hour or so re-arranging my cousin’s store cupboard which, I might add, became a family joke.

Really, really good smells can have a calming effect. Like the smell of frying onions or newly mown grass and of course, the smell of a wood fire. In fact everything about a wood fire is calming including just watching the flames dance. Then there’s gardenias or frangipani and other delicious flower smells – lavender, old-fashioned roses, freesias and even carnations.

As a young person, I soothed my soul when troubled by going into the garden with a large basket and some secateurs. I would cut many flowers, take them into the laundry and arrange them in a variety of vases. The process of arranging the flowers created in my mood a kind of restful serenity which took me out of my miseries.

I suppose, though, that the ultimate in calming activity is listening to calming music. This type of music includes almost anything Baroque and the marvels of Gregorian chant (or as my children used to call it: “Mum’s Church music”). But maybe the pinnacle of musical calm is the huge opus of the extraordinary polymath, Hildegard of Bingen. Her music, sacred and secular, has become so well known in recent years that ABC Classic devotes a whole evening to Hildegard close to International Women’s Day which it calls its Hilda-thon and which is utterly glorious.

So between my kitchen and my music and all the other strategies, I think I’ve finally got calm covered, which for a card-carrying Depressive is a decidedly Good Thing!

 

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Actor David Niven: “You know where you are with Errol Flynn. He always lets you down.”