If you read She Dwells with any regularity, you might remember that hygge is my word of the year. In case you’re unfamiliar with that funky Danish word (pronounced hoo-guh or hue-guh, depending on which source you believe), I’ll offer this quick refresher.
Hygge is sometimes translated as cozy contentment. Other times, it’s translated more simply as cozy or intimate. Hygge can be a noun or a verb–you can hygge all weekend, or you can feel hygge in peaceful moments. Its roots are in other words that mean things like think and mood, suggesting that one might actually have some effect on the other.
For me, hygge stirs up visions of a crackling fire, a good book, a cuddly blanket and a warm drink. All of this sounded delighted in January, when I chose hygge as my word of the year. Standing on the ledge of the warmer season, though–which, in South Texas, generally lasts through the end of October–I’ve been thinking about how to keep the hygge vibe going without the fire and with the ice cubes that make life more bearable.
All of which has led me to this realization: hygge is really more about balance than blankets. It’s about the kind of peace we feel when we’re fully present in a moment–for instance, when you’re reading a book and you become so absorbed in the world it’s creating that you forget about the laundry in the dryer that’s waiting to be folded. Or when you’re having a pleasant dinner with friends and don’t even think to look at the clock for a couple of hours.
The question, then, is what to balance, and how to achieve it.
Online/Offline living
I’ve already written about my need to make some hard choices with regard to my digital life. I’m on the right track there–more about this in a later post–and I can already feel the difference it’s making. I read an actual book in the past week. Cover to cover. And for the most part, I did this because I put electronics off limits. That meant putting down the Kindle and picking up an actual book.
I’ve been thinking about designating our sun room as a tech-free space in our house, to create an online/offline balance in our physical environment. Whether or not my family decides to go along with that, though, I can make the sun room a tech-free space for myself this summer and languish in a lot of tech-free sun.
Indoor/Outdoor time
I love being outdoors, but the truth is that it’s often just too hot to be outside in Texas. And that means spending time outdoors requires some planning.
It’s rarely too hot to be out working in the garden, or walking the dog, before 9 a.m.–so the trick is to get myself going in the morning, rather than lingering with my coffee. And in the afternoon, our big trees shade the back yard and our deck–so although it’s very warm, it isn’t dangerous to be outdoors. I make various excuses to stay safely air-conditioned, in spite of the fact that I know I feel better when I spend some time outside.
Video news/text news
One of my colleagues at the university where I teach–a psychologist–recently pointed out that what information we process isn’t the only thing to consider. How we process that information also matters, because our brains handle audio and visual images differently than they handle text.
When I thought about that, it made complete sense. I feel very different after a half hour of watching the news than after a half hour of reading the newspaper.
And hearing her say this helped me to understand why just avoiding the news–which makes me feel as anxious as the news itself does, much of the time–has never been a good solution for me. Staying away from video news, though, might help me achieve the balance I’m looking for. I’m going to try to spend this summer getting the majority of my news in print and see whether that helps me feel informed, but in control.
Scheduled/Unscheduled time
Because I’m a professor, summer is the time of year when I’m mostly in charge of my own calendar. I still have things to do–this year, that includes helping to build class schedules for our incoming students, preparing the new material I’ll be teaching in the fall, and working on a bunch of writing projects. Still, on the average day, my schedule is under my control.
Letting myself enjoy that unstructured time is something I’ve never been good at doing, though. I’m a planner. I like to know what to expect from the day. And while this means I nearly always do what I’ve planned to, it sometimes means that I stress myself out to get it done. Far too often, the only reason for this stress is my inflexible plan.
When my kids were younger, keeping some unscheduled time in their day during the summer was a priority for me. I didn’t want them to be zooming from one activity to another, because summer is supposed to be built on languorous days. So, this summer, balancing my own daily schedule on big chunks of time with no commitments is going to be a priority. (Enforced flexibility, if you will.) I haven’t decided whether that means I’ll have a schedule-free space in my day, the way I’ll have a tech-free room in my house, or if it simply means I’ll take some time to sit down, have a beverage, and figure out what I feel like doing in that moment.
Hygge definitely takes on a different appearance in the summer, but its goals (as far as I can tell) are essentially the same. Living a hygge life is about
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