I didn't set out to change my routine. I set out to rearrange some furniture on a Sunday afternoon because I was bored and the living room had been in the same configuration since I moved in. What I ended up doing, apparently, was restructuring the second half of every day.
The chair
The Article reading chair had been in the corner by the window, facing the room. I moved it two meters to face the window instead. The change took four minutes. The effect was immediate: facing outward, with the room behind me, the chair stopped feeling like a place for performing relaxation and started feeling like a place for actually doing it. I read for an hour the first night without noticing the time passing.
“The arrangement of a room is an argument about how you want to spend your time in it.
The table
I moved the Muji side table from the sofa to beside the chair. Just one surface, at the right height, with exactly what I use in an evening: a lamp, a coaster, a place for the book. Previously the book lived on the sofa armrest or the coffee table or some other surface that required getting up. Now it doesn't. This sounds trivial. It isn't.
What actually changed
I watch less television. Not because I decided to — I just started sitting in the chair by default when I come home in the evenings, and the chair faces the window, and the television is behind me. The phone stays on the kitchen counter. I started finishing books again after two years of starting them. None of this required willpower. It required moving a chair.
Elena Marchetti
Writer, slow-living enthusiast, and perpetual re-arranger of couch cushions. I share honest reviews of the things I actually live with.
