I love IKEA. Let me tell you why. First, I like the little arrows on the floor that discretely whisper “Shhh, follow me! You’ve already been that way!” Without the arrows, the store layout would be impossible for someone like me to navigate, and I would ha
ve to leave (if I even managed to find an exit) with that nagging feeling, “but did I see EV-ER-Y-THING?”
When I walk into IKEA, solutions to problems, even problems I didn’t know I had are everywhere. If you think about it, finding a solution is really the best time to find out you have a problem. Sometimes I feel like I am just one storage bin away from my whole life making sense and usually the cost is something I can manage and if it isn’t, it’s still a soothing dream. I can tell myself for example, “One day, that rug is going to tie it all together”. IKEA is all about staying where you are, but making it work better. A beautiful, simple, affordable solution; isn’t that what we all want?
I think that’s why people look mostly pretty happy wandering IKEA with their paper measuring tapes (the sign they mean business) and giant shopping bags on their shoulders. It doesn’t hurt that if you play your cards right, there is the possibility of an ice-cream cone on the way out. What could go wrong? Everything is possible. Everything will be better from now on. That’s how I feel anyways. Tell me I’m not the only one. (Seriously, tell me).
But I went through a season … quick aside, why on earth do we call years that nearly broke us “seasons”? As a Canadian on the prairies I know 4 seasons, but they are not divided equally no matter what Environment Canada tells us. Winter is forever, summer is too short, fall to me is like watching someone descend into a bad mood and spring is kind of a joke until it smartens up. In summary, when I say I went through a “season” from here on in I mean a forever winter, not a too short summer. Ok. Let’s move on. In this season I speak of I was grieving a lot of things and felt like a zombie at times. On certain days, I wouldn’t know where to be, where to go. Sometimes I would just get in the car and drive without having yet decided where my destination would be. If I kept driving long enough, from time to time I would wind up at IKEA. Out of habit, I would offer the greeter who seemed to be expecting me my good vein as I hopped aboard the escalator-for-a-better-tomorrow. I wanted to feel that sense of hope. I wanted to see solutions. I wanted to make something, anything beautiful.
On one particular day, I remember wandering around IKEA and being overcome with what I can only describe as a sense of meaninglessness mixed with hopelessness mixed with reality settling in HARD. The colour went out, and no arrows, however well-meaning could direct me out of feeling so lost inside of my own life. There was something about all the people and their hopeful measuring tapes, who looked so normal and apparently unaware that life as you know it can come crashing down inbetween lunch and suppertime. I fantasized about standing on a desk and making a despairing announcement to everyone in a big voice like a bearer of bad news aboard the Titanic. It would have gone something like, “You know, none of this is going to fix anything! A new coffee table can’t fix your marriage, or heal your disease, or whatever is broken!!! It’s not your old tea towels that are preventing you from evolving to a better you any more than the ladle in your disorganized kitchen drawer that never opens properly is responsible for your grudge against your father or you never feeling good enough. Just making sure…Continue on then…Don’t mind me…”
Best case scenario, a hush would fall over the crowd and everyone would look around at each other nodding in agreement, lowering their bags like ashamed Christmas shoppers caught in the sin of commercialism. Likely, one by one they would come forward and lay their tiny pencil in my outstretched hand as a sign of solidarity but mostly as a token of gratitude for the brave message. The less favourable way I imagined this going down involved the nice yellow-shirt people coming quickly to hoist me off of my platform, wrap me in the nearest throw and haul me away. I would have let them. It would have felt nice to be carried around in a blanket those days. I think part of what was hard was that I just missed blending in, feeling normal, feeling like myself. I get that the speech wouldn’t have moved the needle towards normal even a little.
I was fearful of how long the winter was going to be and of who I would even be by the end of it. Would I still be me? Surely these things change us in the forever kind of way like a limp or scar that didn’t used to be there. A day comes when it’s time to roll up our sleeves and settle in for the hard work of facing pain and accepting healing, a rebuild that requires so much more than an allen key. But who knows how long that work takes? Dealing with pain is so much easier when we know when the end point is, or that there even is one.
For me, it can be very tempting at this point to say, “Good enough” and most days it is. But other days I hear the rattle of broken things that time (in the form of a million conversations, books and prayers) hasn’t swept away and the idea of throwing an area rug at that heap sounds like a simple and beautiful solution. “All good here! Pay no attention to that lumpy rug!” But I don’t really want to live that way. I think of the celebrated “Demo Day” on Fixer Upper where sledgehammers often recklessly destroy a home often within inches of seriously harming someone. My husband tells me that’s not really how it’s done in real life, but I think that IS how real life feels sometimes. First experience demolition, then experience the re-build. Sometimes that is the only way. Death and then Life.
Like with most renovations or building projects I often worry I am falling behind schedule and wonder if there a way to do this quicker and without so much effort and emotions involved? But, I don’t want to be a layers of wallpaper over mold kind of person, I want to be willing to deal with whatever lurks behind even if that means washing dishes in the bathtub for a while. That mold makes me act weird sometimes and say stupid stuff or feel hurt when nothing is happening and besides it makes forgiveness hard. It’s in the air my children and husband breathe and for crying out loud I have asthma!! So… I’ll keep working at it, I guess. See you at IKEA! Just kidding…. No, you will totally see me there, I love it. But I won’t be fooled again IKEA, you can’t fix me.
grit & company 