By Design
The building blocks of design are: line, direction, shape, size, texture, value, colour and pattern. Many of the lines we live with are mostly straight, either vertical or horizontal. They give the rooms that we inhabit shape and add definition to such things as windows and doors. We all agree that building blocks are vital to the foundations of our homes and yet we are more miss than hit when it comes to building for ourselves a more genuine self.
Carolyn Kenmore once said, “If you can learn from hard knocks, you can also learn from soft touches.” The problem as I see it is that, the soft touches are fewer and farther between. Maybe it’s the reason we don’t get it when the answer we know we need is staring us right in the face. We have become unaccustomed to a soft touch.
And we are all so easily distracted these days. If it’s not one thing it’s something else tugging at our shirt-tails, demanding our full attention. Most soft touch experiences are hardly more than a whisper infact. You have to lean forward in your chair to hear and even then, you might not catch all that’s being said.
Sometimes they’re hastily written notes where you can’t quite decipher the last paragraph and all you can do is take an educated guess at what’s being alluded to by the writer. Granted, it can be frustrating, but the point is made. We feel, we felt it. And the more we let ourselves feel it, the more in fact, we become accustomed to knowing the soft touch when it happens to us.
The wind has a waspish sting to it today, Tilly has been acting like a modern day kamikaze ripping up the sky and all the while tittering at a ferocious pace. She’s so excitable these days, boisterous of heart, I wondering if it’s catching.
The stocktake is parked on a siding today, there are other things to think about, such as soft touches and the like. My friend Fay has a book inside her busy life that needs to be written. The rest of us need her to write it, and she will. Maybe, sometime. I’m hoping it will be sooner rather than later because as Winter fast approaches I need a good book to read.
