WELCOME TO THE NEXT CHAPTER

DEAR READER,

Although I am posting here my farewell column, which ran a few weeks ago in newspapers that carried my weekly column for so many years (bless each one), for us this is not farewell. This is simply a new chapter. Because you’ve subscribed to my blog, you are coming along.

Where are we going? Let’s discover together, but here’s what’s changing.

For several years, I’ve been posting every Monday morning my column, two or three weeks after it ran in newspapers. (You can still search and find those columns on this site.) While I still will post my musings, tips and photos in a less formal format from time to time, I also plan to share content in other forms. For instance, I plan to share links to recent webinars, podcasts, and radio and TV interviews I’ve done, as well as advice from others worth repeating.

Most important, I also will include news from you. I want this blog to be your blog, too, in a way that my newspaper column couldn’t be. Send your design questions, dilemmas, and successes along with relevant photos if you have them to me at marni@marnijameson.com. I will field what I can. Also send me your downsizing and rightsizing stories, including lessons learned.

Finally, please invite others to sign up for the blog and help our community grow. (I will never share your names or addresses, and subscribing is free.) So, while the following message is a good-bye of sorts, for us it’s really hello again.  

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

 Marni

An Ending, a Beginning, a Few Parting Thoughts

A New Year is not only a time to recommit to exercise more, lose weight and, yes, declutter our homes, but it is also a time of personal reflection, which I have been doing a lot lately. After nearly 21 years of writing this weekly column, and much soul searching, I have decided to make a change. This may not be difficult news for you, but it is for me. So please indulge me once more as I wax and pine in this final dispatch.

Writing this column and being part of your lives, however small, has been the greatest honor of my career. I am immensely grateful and fortunate to have been carried in so many community newspapers, which made it possible to share coffee with you on Saturday mornings.

I am thankful to my editors who embraced my content and made room in their home sections for my idea of what a home column should be — a voice that reflected the struggles as well as the secrets behind beautiful living, while dealing with family members, money, time, and the limits they all impose.

I am humbled to have been entrusted with many of your domestic decisions, including whether to put a fireplace in your remodeled living room, how soon is it okay to remodel after losing a spouse, and what to do with grandma’s beloved Lladro collection.

I am grateful to the many, many experts — the interior designers, architects, artisans, painters, carpenters, stone masons, rug weavers, quilters, upholsterers, wineglass enthusiasts, textile experts, basket weavers, furniture makers, color consultants, caterers, cutlery crafters, organizers, Realtors, appraisers, and more — who, during hundreds of hours of conversation, gave me master classes in their professions, generously sharing their expertise, so I could share it with you.

I am profoundly appreciative of the readers who educated me, including the legions of engineers who quickly set me straight on the difference between concrete and cement, words, I learned, that are not interchangeable. I have learned so much from you.

We’ve had a good run. We’ve shared some laughs. When I started this column, my children were in grade school. I was living in the Rocky Mountains, and I did not need to color my hair or wear glasses. Today, my daughters are both in professional careers and married. One has a baby. I live in Florida. Combatting the gray and having glasses stashed in every room and pocket are just two of many reminders that time is going by.

Along the way, we’ve gone through multiple moves (10 in 20 years, which exhausts me to think about), the downsizing of family homes, divorce, remarriage, remodels, lots of remodels, holidays, celebrations, loss, reinvention and many bottles of Advil and alcohol. I hope I’ve helped you through life half as much as you’ve helped me.

Newspapers have changed, readership has changed, and I have changed. As Oprah said when she ended her 25-year-long TV show, “I feel it in my bones.” Though her bank account is much larger than mine, our bone-deep feelings are the same. It’s time. Today, a new generation of influencers, Instagrammers and YouTubers, some who are fantastically entertaining, smart and creative, are adding fresh perspectives to the field of home design and better living. I want to cede the floor.

What will I do instead? As some of you know, I also have a day job. I lead a patient advocacy nonprofit that deserves and requires more of my time. I will get my weekends back and spend more time traveling with my husband and seeing my new grandbaby without packing along my laptop. And I have a new book in mind, my eighth, that I’d like to write.

Although I will no longer be filing a weekly column, I am not planning to stop voicing my unsolicited opinions on home design, gracious living, and rightsizing, through my books, public speaking, and media and podcast interviews. You can tune into those on my website and subscribe to my missives there.

As I write this, it’s fittingly New Year’s Day. Not an ending, but rather a bittersweet beginning. I will miss this. However, as I launch my next chapter, I leave you for now with these thoughts:

·      Be you. Don’t decorate for anyone else. Create a home that reflects your personality, your life, your heritage and your interests, as beautifully as possible.

·      Seek out the fewer and better. Surround yourself with quality, not quantity. This holds true for people as well as material goods.

·      Be intentional. To live beautifully, you have to do more than just want to; you have to work at it, make an ongoing effort. You have to both care and try. You get to live once. Honor the act.

·      Entertain. Don’t wait until your house is perfect to have guests over. Connecting with others is the fabric and soul of life. Open your home and heart often to engage with family, neighbors, friends, and co-workers.

·      Take stock. As I have preached, letting go, whether of stuff or obligations (like this column), at the right time, helps not only to simplify your life but also to make room for what else matters. Make editing your life an ongoing process.

·      Evolve. Life changes. Have the courage to shed. Let go of anything — belongings, jobs, relationships — that no longer serves, fulfills or enriches you. Hanging onto the past robs us of the present and, more important, of the potential for a better future. Thank you for reading.

Live well, Marni

CAPTION: Letting go, whether of stuff or obligations, at the right time, helps not only to simplify your life but also to make room for what else matters. Maninder Singh/Dreamstime

Marni Jameson is the award-winning author of seven books including Rightsize Today to Create Your Best Life Tomorrow, What to Do With Everything You Own to Leave the Legacy You Want, and Downsizing the Family Home. You may reach her at marni@marnijameson.com.