The waiting game

Waiting is making me lose my mind, but colours are making me happy.

I don’t think I realised how hard I find it not having control of my life until this year. And having said that, in many ways I am the opposite of a control freak - there are so many things I absolutely could have control of that I just let slide - and I thrive on elements of the unexpected and seeing where things go. I suppose the point there is that I choose an element of not-micromanaging myself; I look back on the way my life has gone with delight, because the vast majority of it was so unplanned - mainly the result of noticing and wandering through open doors - and I like it very much. But I seem to have spent a long time hanging around waiting for news from doctors and hospitals this year, and I’m wearying of it.

One of the ways I’m combatting it is in trying to plan what I can (at work as well), but I am also realising a couple of things, and the main one is how colour is everything to me (I mean, this isn’t new. I have always been majorly plugged into my own awareness of colour, ever since I had two of my A-level Art teachers tell me separately that I had the best sense of colour that one had ever seen, and the worst sense of colour that one of them had ever seen (I treasured the “best” and laughed at the “worst”), but right now, at this rather challenging time in my life, I will happily sit and stare at two colours sitting side by side, and feel absolute joy).

The other day I jumped back into a warm-weather routine, which is washing my linen clothes and ironing them while they are damp. I had everything hanging up on the bookcase after ironing because I was watching TV while ironing. I thought how pretty all my clothes looked, and how excited I was to wear them (and how I have been enjoying wearing them already).

It was a really rainy winter, but spring has been surprisingly spring-like for Rome - almost like a season in its own right! - and I haven’t felt despairing about my wardrobe. I think the difference has been that this spring it has got gradually warmer without doing that dramatic thing it often does here, of being sweater-weather in the early morning, and beach-weather by the afternoon. I wear my light down coat and a thin scarf in the morning, both of which easily fold into my bag for home time, and I don’t feel so cold in the morning that I have to swaddle myself in wool, and so uncomfortable by the afternoon that I want to strip off. It’s so nice! I feel as though I finally get why people get excited about dressing for spring!

But one of the things I realised while admiring my clothes adorning my bookshelves was that I recognise how important it is that everything I look at is something that delights me. I need to love every damn thing I have brought into my home, and when I don’t (looking at you, horrible laundry basket), it bothers me. I can live with the bathrooms, the aircon units, the radiators, the floors: if they really bothered me, I have had ample time over the past 25 years to do something about them. I can live with the current two-tone nature of my living-room walls, because it means I am no longer living with damp bits of wall, and I don’t have the energy to paint it all. But I need the furniture and the decoration to be things I love. And the upside of that (and because I am so very kind to myself) is that I do love everything my eye falls on. Colour is really thrilling me at the moment - not dramatic, high contrast stuff, but just gentle juxtapositions of colours that don’t match, but that do go together because they just happened to end up grouped together.

And also my clothes and shoe combinations continue to make me happy. My warm-weather wardrobe pretty much works together whatever I do with it because I like all the colours together so I can pretty much just grab any random combination of top, bottom and jacket, and they will look good together.

This newsletter is exceptionally rambly, and I’m not sure what its main premise is, to be honest. I think it probably just reflects my current state of mind, which is just a loop of waiting and fixating.