Micro-decorating as spiritual practice

If you've been reading guy with an eye for a while, you know that the topic we keep returning to is micro-decorating: engineering those small design moves with big results that can elevate your home and your life.

You might be skeptical, though. Is it really true that arranging and rearranging things – on a shelf, desktop, side table, windowsill – can have dramatic consequences? Aren't we fooling ourselves to imagine that the placement of ordinary objects can trigger the extraordinary?

Let me pull back the curtain a little and share with you what's behind the art of micro-decorating. The things you're placing are only half of the story. The other half is your way of looking at what's right in front of you.

There's no better way of expressing it than the way William Blake does in the first four lines of Auguries of Innocence:

When you play close attention to the landscape at your fingertips, you'll soon discover that it's hardly as small as you first thought.

Touch what's close to you. See what happens when your hand makes something nearby change.

Wait patiently.

There's something magic about to happen and it's as much within you as outside of you.