Cutting spaces

Happy 2010, everyone! I’m still on holiday really, but am slowly starting to rev my motor for the new year by making my first blog post of the decade.

Once all the relatives left town and we weren’t making treks across the peninsula laden with bowls of salad and bags of presents, Paul and I spent an intensely domestic holiday at home. We cleaned and cleared, hung pictures and polished wood, polyfilled and painted, read piles of novels, napped, and drank pints of tea. All of this has been deeply restorative, and I’m very happy to have prepared so well for the inevitable entropy of a new year.

But apart from cleaning and reading, the thing I always find enormously restful is cutting, so between cups of tea, I gathered blades, cardboard, paper and tape and set myself a project, which involved cutting hundreds and hundreds of small squares of card.

It took a while, but once I’d cut all these squares (over 500 of them!), I had myself a month-by-month calendar for the new year, and one I can reuse next year too, as the dates are written on a sheet of writing paper taped behind.

Those little cut squares are called “negative spaces”, but they represent a couple of positive things for me: Firstly, looking at those piled-up squares gives me a sense of all the days available in 2010, which is an exciting prospect. And secondly, having made the time to make something just because I wanted to, and having had the time to make sure I did it really well, has been a rare treat, and most satisfying. My intention for this new year is that I will arrange my life so that I can do things properly, and not in a mad and frantic gallop, which pretty much wore me out in 2009.  I’ll try to use the spaces I cut on my calendar to remember to carve out positive spaces in my year.

Happy 2010 everyone! Hope it’s full of piles of positive spaces for you too.