Change Is in the Air

When we were finally ready to have our house painted earlier this month, we knew that choosing the color would be a challenge. My husband liked blue, I liked green, so we would likely end up with something from the palette “compromise”, like beige. Ironically, it was exactly what the previous owners had chosen inside and out. It worked very well with the stone features, tiles, and the whole house design. We could have and should have easily repainted it. I should have at least voiced the idea. Instead, I didn’t even consider it an option. Why? To put it simply, as much as I liked the neutral beige and cream, after two years of looking at it, I was quite tired of it. I needed a change.

When I identified that the need for a change as my reason, I immediately wondered if it was a reason good enough. Wasn't craving change impulsive? Shouldn’t it go away the same way craving for chocolate does? Apparently it lasts only seven minutes. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that in my case the two were not the same. I might easily resist chocolate, but I seek and welcome change, especially in the spring, when the whole world transforms before my eyes and change is basically in the air.

Naturally, the change I am seeking is not mindless replacement of perfectly fine things and people in my life, in pursuit of novelty. I am talking about change that truly leads to a shift or transformation, however little, physical or mental. I want change that wakes up and shakes up my senses and makes me see, smell, feel, and hear things more clearly. Or differently.

So, even if keeping the neutral beige was an obvious choice for our rustic house and would have saved us a lot of time, the new "moody green-gray, evocative of misty summer mornings" (as Benjamin Moore poetically put it), makes me look around my living room and notice it in a different light. It inspires me to clean, rearrange and decorate. It’s refreshing and invigorating. It is the change I needed.