Your Backyard Paradise Is Closer Than You Think

I borrowed the title and picture from the cover of Home & Decor Magazine, which arrived in the mail today, to try to put a different slant on the point I made in my previous post. The magazine cover picture does look almost like a vacation spot — compare it, for example, to the Fear of Nothing cover painting. And I know people who have spent their vacation money on something like this to make their back yard look like a vacation. And after doing that, they went away on a vacation anyway. Because the back yard, however nice it looked, was still no substitute for a vacation.

Connecting a Home to Its Surroundings

Did you pick a home for the pleasant scenery surrounding it, only to be too busy with what you’re doing inside the house to notice or appreciate the surrounding landscape? Does it sometimes seem as if there is nothing to connect the inside and outside when the door is closed? The energy of the world around you naturally tends to connect to the inside of your house unless you do something to block it, and usually when this happens, it is because:

Find New Meaning in Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning is a time to clean everything you own. It’s something that is traditionally done in spring so you can clean with the windows open and not breathe quite so much dust and fumes as you go along. But spring cleaning can mean much more than this.

Cleaning is work, but that’s not what makes some of us dread spring cleaning. It’s the idea of “everything you own” that makes spring cleaning difficult. You can’t clean everything you own without looking at everything you own — and that brings up a whole range of questions. Probably for most of the things you have, the last time you saw them was the last time you cleaned them, so why do you have them — do you have them just to clean them? Or, why do you have so little time to do the things you ought to be doing with them? How did it happen and what does it mean that you have so many things and so little time? Time is so short that few of us honestly clean everything we have every spring. If we do not have time to clean our things, what are the chances that we will ever find time to use them? Just thinking of questions such as these, you might well ask, “Can’t I just put it all off till next spring?” After all, life is busy enough without have to clean everything too.

The No Rainy Days List

Today I am introducing the new No Rainy Days List. It is a list for anyone who agrees with the idea that life can’t wait for a rainy day — that it has to happen today. As a short way of saying this, I like to say that there are “no rainy days.” The following excerpt from the very beginning of Fear of Nothing explains more about what this means.

Get Your Whole Life Organized in 10 Minutes!

It’s the first day of a new month, and time to finally get organized. And not by the same old techniques like making lists or spring cleaning that have never worked in the past, either. With these quick tips from Michele Connolly of GetOrganizedWizard.com, you can get your whole life organized in just ten minutes!

The Clothing Swap

You want to breathe some new life into your wardrobe, but you can’t spend much money and you have too much clothing already: that’s exactly the situation that calls for a clothing swap.

The Groundhog Day Effect

The movie Groundhog Day depicts a man forced to live the same day over and over again. Life seems like that sometimes, when today does not seem much like a new day, just the day after yesterday. The feeling that every day is just another version of the same thing is what I call the Groundhog Day effect. It’s a problem because when you start to expect more of the same, it becomes hard to find or create anything new.

In reality, every day is different, with different actions and different situations. You cannot escape the Groundhog Day effect by trying very hard to do something different, because you’re already doing something new and different every day. It just doesn’t feel like it. The way to escape the Groundhog Day effect is to put more of your energy into the things that make every day different.

Not Missing Out on Inauguration Day

The United States will inaugurate a new president in two days, and at least one in 50 people in the country is personally involved in the event, going to Washington to be part of it, going to an observance elsewhere, or helping the rest of us keep up with the events. It is a ritual built up around an oath of office that, in a pinch, could be done by four people in less than a minute, yet millions of people will be spending most of the day on it. And others worry that they may be missing out.