An Eye For Detail

I have a cleaning lady who I like very much and who cleans quite well. But she is absolutely hopeless at seeing if beds are not made properly, pillows and cushions not well ordered, if things are out of place or plants and flowers not watered.  Just because I do like her I find it hard to keep telling her what she has done wrong though I've tried and tried again to demonstrate how I want things to look if I happen to see their disorder when she is around. She just does not get it.  And I reflect in my frustration just how many people do have an eye for detail, or an eye for color and a natural sense of style. And if you have to be born with it like an innate ear for music, or if you can learn it.

When I was younger I was always trying to tell people in my various books and in talks how to really look at things. How to actually see instead of just passing over as it were. I thought people could learn good color sense, how to arrange objects, how to juxtapose things well. I thought I could encourage people to learn to memorize certain arrangements they liked, or ways of doing things, or different styles and why. Or at least, I thought, they could learn such things from books and articles in decorating magazines even if they could not keep ideas in their heads and had to keep referring.  But now that I am old I realize that on the whole you have to be born with that sort of sense of style or at least be curious about why some things work well aesthetically and some don't - even if you are not actually conscious of aesthetics or what they mean.

So the gift of curiosity is probably one of the main things to hope for in a child. Not the peeping Tom sort of curiosity of course, but the gift for wanting to know about things, to always be learning whatever the field, whether it is how things are, how they work or how they look.

By the same token, I suppose, It is so cheering to work with clients who have ideas of their own, who can articulate what they want, with whom you can work absolutely together filling in each others' gaps as it were. From whom, of course, one  can learn oneself.  I am profoundly lucky to have worked with such people including - or because of - some who I have worked with for over 20 years

I see, or fear that this blog is turning out to be more philosophical than practical and not like the one run so admirably and efficiently by my good friend Jean Nayer called The Happy Home Workshop with all its good ideas.  Well, I suppose there is no harm in that. It takes all sorts as they say. And its good, after all, to stop every so often to think around things. Or to be like that late 19th/early 20th century tramp poet, William Davis, who wrote: 'What is this world if full of care/We have no time to stand and stare.'