‘One day’ – two little words which can become huge obstacles if we let them. What’s on your ‘one day’ list?
One day I’ll…
- Get fit
- Eat healthier
- Call my grandmother
- Sort out that cupboard
- Think about my savings
One day…
As a family we’ve been thinking lots about the process of simplification and living more intentionally with what we have but we realised something. We often found ourselves speaking about the limitations of our home and listing the things we’d do ‘one day’ when we moved to somewhere bigger. However we love where we live, we actually do treasure our little house and the area we live in suits us perfectly. So this got us thinking, which of our ‘one days’ could we make happen now?
The thing that we kept coming back to was that in the eight years we’ve been married we’ve often spoken of our desire to have a piano. We love the feeling of playing a real piano with all it’s weathered eccentricities. Learning grade 3 scales, singing with our siblings, composing songs and playing carols for an elderly folks christmas lunch, our family pianos had really been at the centre of things as we’d grown up. Objectively looking around our home there was no space for it, no wall without a radiator, fireplace or sofa so we always confined it to ‘one day’. Until one day.
We saw some research that suggests that most people don’t use all of their homes, in fact we tend to congregate in a predictable few areas, the kitchen, computer, tv. The diagram below shows an average (American) family’s use of their house.
We had a slight epiphany when we realised that one of the sofas in our living room had become a glorified inbox collecting post and toys but rarely get sat on. There were more seating options than there were people in the house so the question formed ‘why not get rid of it?’. We really want our kids to experience of fun of having live music in the home and right then our space wasn’t reflecting that value so off the sofa had to go.
Amazingly as we made that decision we also found out that we were inheriting a family piano, it’s yet to arrive but hopefully when it does it will mean our home says a little more about what we value rather than putting it off to ‘one day’.