The Petals I Didn't Sweep Up.

It's July, and everyone is home. The dishwasher seems to be on a permanent cycle. Dirty cups appear in the sitting room faster than I can carry them back to the kitchen, only to mysteriously reappear a few hours later. There are coats slung over the backs of chairs, shoes abandoned in the hall, and creative projects spreading themselves across the kitchen table. (That bit, I rather love.) and my own bedroom is probably the untidiest room in the house because by the time I've sorted everyone else's things I seem to run out of steam when it comes to my own.

Welcome to the summer holidays.

This used to bother me more than it does now. Or perhaps that's not quite true. I still notice it. I still have moments when I wander around picking things up and muttering under my breath. But somewhere over the years I've become less interested in winning the battle against the mess and more interested in asking myself why I thought I had to win it in the first place. This feels especially true now that we are a household of 6 people (all but one an adult now) and we are all just living our lives... the mess is just us living.

There's a wonderful book by Mary Randolph Carter called A Perfectly Kept House Is the Sign of a Misspent Life. I think about that title more often. Not because I don't love beautiful homes—I do, obviously—but because it questions the sort of beauty we're chasing. For years we've been told that calm looks a certain way. Bare surfaces. Barely any possessions. Everything edited to within an inch of its life. And don't get me wrong, that can be beautiful. It can absolutely be one version of calm. But it comes at a cost and I've started to wonder whether we're asking too much of ourselves. Because once you've created that kind of perfection, there's the pressure to keep it there. Day after day. Cup after cup. Cushion after cushion. It becomes another job to do. Another standard to maintain. Another quiet pressure humming away in the background. A different kind of clutter, the clutter of your mind telling you the you must keep things perfect.

What if calm looked like something else entirely? What if it meant caring a little less about certain things?

When Dave used to dress the children when they were small he had a remarkable gift for getting it spectacularly wrong. Now, before I go any further, I should say that Dave has many talents. Dressing babies wasn't one of them. He always managed to find the top that was somehow both crumpled and the wrong colour. If there was a questionable outfit bought by a well-meaning relative lurking at the bottom of a drawer, that would inevitably be the one he reached for. Looking back, I'm not entirely sure how he managed it so consistently.

It drove me mad. Not enough to say anything out loud, perhaps, but enough that I was often tempted to sneak upstairs and change them before we left the house.

And then one day I had an epiphany that end up changing much bigger things. If I insisted that the children looked exactly as I wanted them to, I was also insisting that I would have to do every nappy change. Every dressing session. Every rushed morning before nursery. Every bedtime. Because if someone is constantly corrected, eventually they stop offering to help.

So I made a decision. I decided not to mind.

Looking back, it remains one of the best decisions I have ever made. The children weren't always dressed the way I would have chosen, but they had a father who thought nothing of scooping them up, getting them dressed and heading out into the garden while I drank a cup of tea in peace. Dave never felt criticised or second-guessed. The children didn't care whether their stripes matched their trousers. They just knew they were with their dad.

What seemed like a tiny thing to let go of gave us all something much bigger.

I've often wondered whether our homes ask exactly the same thing of us.

A wise woman once told me, "The washing up will still be there tomorrow." She was right, It will. If not today 's washing up then it will be tomorrow's... You empty the dishwasher and by lunchtime somebody's made toast and three cups of tea. You fold the washing and someone changes into something more comfortable. You clear the kitchen table and before you know it someone's painting, wrapping a birthday present or leaving a parcel there because they haven't decided where else it belongs. The work is never really finished- but that's the point. It's called life.

But there's a pressure... that we put on ourselves to make everything perfect and with the advent of social media I don't think the pressure has ever been quite as constant as it is now. Instagram has a great deal to answer for. A certain version of good taste has seeped into every corner of our feeds until it no longer feels like inspiration—it feels like expectation. We find ourselves coveting a lampshade because it appeared in the right photograph, or wondering whether our shelves should look more like somebody else's. What used to be occasional—the spring clean, the tidy before visitors—has become a low hum of pressure that never quite switches off.

We're surrounded by photographs of homes that look beautiful, and often they truly are. But photographs don't show the washing basket that's been shoved just outside the frame. They don't show yesterday's post or the muddy dog towels or the pile of Amazon boxes waiting to be flattened. And somehow we've started apologising for all those things. "Oh, excuse the mess." How many times have you said that? I know I have. As though evidence that people actually live in our homes is something faintly embarrassing.

The strange thing is, when I think back to the houses I've loved most, they were never immaculate. They were the ones with books piled beside beds. A kitchen table covered in seed packets and bits of string because somebody had been in the garden. Dogs asleep exactly where they weren't supposed to be. Flowers dropping petals onto old wooden tables because nobody had got round to throwing them away yet (and why would you, fallen petals are so beautiful). Those are the houses that live in my mind. Not because they were messy but because they felt generous. They made room for life.

And perhaps that's where this thought has been taking me all along. Not towards caring less, I don't think that's it. I still love arranging flowers. I still move furniture around more often than is probably necessary. I still believe our homes affect how we feel more profoundly than we realise. But maybe it's also about caring differently. Choosing to see the vase of sweet peas over the pile of post. Choosing lunch in the garden instead of another twenty minutes chasing everybody else's cups around the house. Choosing to sit with a book while the dishwasher hums away in the background, knowing perfectly well that by tomorrow there will be another load waiting.

Homes aren't museums, they're not photographs. They're places where people live. And maybe the most beautiful homes aren't the ones where nothing is out of place. Maybe they're the ones where people feel so completely at home that they forget to worry about whether everything is.

Calm doesn't always come from making big changes. More often, it begins with one small, thoughtful moment.

That's exactly why I created One Calm Moment — a simple guide to help you see your home differently and discover how small changes can have a surprisingly powerful effect on the way you feel.

If today's Studio Notes resonated with you, you'll find it in the link below.

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