Heavy Lifting
Or, How to Rearrange the Furniture (Actual and Mental)
I come from a line of furniture rearrangers. Both my grandmother, Roma, and my mother, Susan, made a hobby of regularly reconfiguring the rooms they lived in. This habit could be activated by anxiety, or by boredom, by frustration, or a bolt of inspiration. The spirit moved them, and they moved the furniture.
My father found my mom’s habit dismaying, disorienting. He would come home to the change to his home, and feel perhaps he should have been consulted first. The Libra in me can see both sides. But in my heart, I’m with her on this one.
I too prefer to work alone. First of all, the creative spark of maybe this over there and that over here comes on quick as a fever and as with most creative ideas you can’t sleep on it if you want to make something happen. Secondly, I don’t want another person’s doubtful opinion to hamper the spirit of overly optimistic experimentation that I always enter into the endeavor with. Someone might be tempted to say something along the lines of, “I’m not sure that will work” and that is not the improvisational energy of furniture rearrangement I’m seeking— the Yes, And of improv comedy, an openness to the possibility that any configuration might work. Infinite possibility. No bad ideas. And thirdly, it is back breaking labor and if you’re in a grudging mood, you will probably complain about the arduous nature of a task in which you deliberately throw order into chaos in the hopes of discovering a new order. No thank you. As my mother used to say to me when I was small, “The complaints department is closed.”
The mood of furniture rearranging is scrappy—the mood is I’ve got this; the mood is why the hell not?
