Your home is a sediment of who you've been

Thoughts from meditation, travel, and twenty years of walking into other people's lives.

I travel a lot. And one of the things I keep noticing, standing in front of some elaborate Baroque ceiling or wandering through an ornate Viennese apartment, is that all of that visual richness doesn't feel overwhelming the way it probably should. It feels, somehow, right. Of its time.

I think I finally understand why. The people who lived inside those spaces had informationally very simple lives. No news cycle, no notifications, no infinite scroll of other people's choices. Their minds had bandwidth for the the visual complexity. It was stimulation in a life that otherwise offered very little of it. Their eyes could rest there. So could their minds.

Somewhere in the last hundred years, without entirely meaning to, we started stripping things back. Modernism felt like ideology. In my opinion it was a nervous system response.

I was sitting in meditation recently, which is where a lot of my clearest thinking happens, and I noticed my mind drifting to a client. The state of their home and the way they moved through it. The way they talked about their body. And I started to see something I've been circling for a while but hadn't quite named.

There's a pattern in this work. People who live inside a lot of visual complexity, lots of colour, layers, objects, texture, they often have minds that are genuinely quieter. More settled. More present. They have perceptual bandwidth available, so the richness doesn't cost them anything. It might even ground them.

And then there are the people with the busy minds, the high-stimulation inner lives, the ones running ten things at once. They tend, almost unconsciously, toward empty surfaces. The surgeon who comes home to a silent white kitchen. Not because they followed the latest interior trend, rather because their system is already full and the simple space is the only place it gets to exhale.

Neither is wrong. They're just different nervous systems asking for different things.

What I find more interesting is the question of holding on.

There's real psychological research on hoarding and grief, and what it shows is that objects become

proxies for memory, for identity, for people and moments we haven't finished with yet. Letting go of a thing can feel neurologically identical to losing what it represents. The brain often doesn't distinguish. And in somatic therapy, the same pattern shows up in the body itself. Some people unconsciously build physical mass as a buffer between themselves and the world, a kind of fortress the nervous system constructs when it doesn't feel safe enough without one. These aren't discipline problems. They're protection strategies.

I think about this often in relation to clutter. The mess in the drawer, the weight carried in the body, the noise in the mind at 3am. They aren't three separate problems. They're the same conversation happening in three different languages.

Most people's homes are a kind of sediment. Layers of different life chapters compressed on top of each other, never quite cleared. The 2015 version of themselves still living in the bookshelf.

I also want to say something about the people whose homes look chaotic but whose minds are fine. I know this person well. I am this person, on the right day. When I'm deep in a project, I don't register the mess around me. I'm not avoiding it. I know it's there, I know I'll deal with it, and I'm simply prioritising. That's not disorder. That's focus. A brain that can gate out irrelevant information to complete a task is working exactly as it should.

All of which brings me back to what I actually do for a living, and what I think it really is.

I can't install a system into someone that doesn't match how they think. I can't impose minimalism on a person whose nervous system needs fullness to feel at home. I can't declutter someone into a version of themselves they haven't become yet and might never be. That's not design. That's wishful thinking with a mood board.

What I can do is meet the person who is actually in front of me. Understand where their capacity for care runs out, and design around that edge rather than past it. Find out whether the chaos is protection, or habit, or simply a life chapter that hasn't been given permission to end.

Environments don't update themselves. They just quietly hold everything you've put into them, and wait.