As a designer, I’m drawn to seek the harmony in things. How color can balance a room. How furniture can create symmetry. How pattern and texture can add visual interest. How, then, all those things work together to make a space feel like home. I’ve grown to love the challenge of this, walking into chaos and creating order, fine-tuning the look or feel of every little piece until it all flows beautifully.
I’m a fixer, a refiner—and in some ways I’ve made a career out of sharpening the instinct that draws my eye toward the off-balance and out of sync. The part that can be harder is the pausing. Turning my gaze inward. Looking curiously at the chaos of my own busy life to try to create some order or fine-tune a few too-familiar ways of living that may no longer serve me. Because, while self-reflection is healthy and good and necessary, it can be uncomfortable. It can be quiet. It can go slow. It can make you second-guess, well, everything.
These quarterly columns I write tend to require it of me, but left to my own devices, I’m not convinced I’d volunteer to tune in to my yeses and nos long enough to see if more thought would have me choose differently. I’m more likely to tell myself that the timing is no good now and that I’ll have more capacity once we get through this busy season or after the next project crosses the finish line.
But deep down, I can admit there are days when I feel like I’m living in a held breath. Days when I wonder whether my minutes and hours really reflect the things I value most. But: attune. This theme we’re exploring begs for movement, for interruption. It reminds us that it’s OK to adjust and readjust the rhythms and choices that have become our way of life if the promise is more peace, more days of feeling at ease within the life we’re scripting. Tuning in gives us permission to pause the background music and rewrite which notes come next.
"Tuning in gives us permission to pause the background music and rewrite which notes come next."
Perhaps this doesn’t feel necessary to you. Maybe you walk through the present with a certain sureness about where you are, the rhythms that define your days, and the destination you’re headed for. But there’s a good chance you haven’t always felt so sure of things. Or you might not again somewhere down the road. But the beauty of being attuned is that it can also show you the things worth beholding. The million wonders to savor. The thousand reasons to say thank you. There’s the reality that we may not like what we see when we look curiously. Or we may worry that stepping off the treadmill that keeps us going and doing will only make it harder to jump back on and catch back up. But it also might be our only shot to catch our breath. The only time our soul gets its chance to catch up with us.
So, I’m making a promise, and I’m forcing myself to pause, purposefully, for the next little while. For me, it begins with pulling back in some areas at the office. Because, the truth is, I love to work. Discipline, for me, isn’t getting to the office by 8 a.m. Discipline, for me, is going in late.
The break you may need could be from something else entirely. Is there a part of your life that feels blurry? A problem you can’t seem to untangle? A decision that has no clear answer? Perhaps you can’t name it but something just feels out of sync. Let’s call a time-out for a moment so we can tune in and reset our intentions.
In the end, here’s what I’m hoping for: the beauty of what we’ll see with this little bit of clarity. There may be some discomfort and awkwardness at first. But slowly, truth fills the space we’re making. Maybe something does need to change. Or maybe you realize that you’re already living the life you dreamed of. You only needed clearer eyes to see it.
Our team chose the theme of attune for our fall issue on purpose. This time of year feels rich with acknowledgement. Fall stirs the leaves, the wind, the dust beneath. The trees outside make a show of tuning in to the natural shifting of things, shaking off what’s worth shedding, undeterred by a more stripped-down posture of living. Nature, one of my favorite teachers, understands what we sometimes forget: Refining what we know is how we grow.
This season, I’m going to follow nature’s lead. I’ll look to the trees and their changing leaves, and I’ll tune in to what’s worth shedding and worth keeping. I’ll pause, with purpose, until the new melody that holds me starts to sound like harmony—when life flows beautifully and it feels like home again.
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