All righty, y'all, let's talk about light quality.
You'll get this advice in pretty much every decorating and feng shui guide you can find so I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know, but light is important in your living space. If you're doing a crossword puzzle or cross-stitching a pillow you want to be able to really see what you're doing, but if you're having a cocktail party a bunch of blazing lights aren't going to do much to promote the right mood. I didn't have to tell you that, right? But something I think people tend not to consider is how the light around them influences their daily lives.
For a while, I had a day job in which my office was lit by what felt like about fifty overhead florescent tubes. It was obnoxiously bright and the light had that horrible yellowish cast which already makes me grumpy but when combined with eight hours of staring at a computer screen also gave me terrible headaches. That office also had no windows, so when I decided to never again turn on the overhead lights and just instead bring in my own individual lamps it took two 60-watt desk lamps and one 100-watt floor lamp to make things mildly visible, but it became a much more pleasant place to work (at least in that respect) and I became a much more pleasant person for it.
So think about how you respond to light levels, certainly, but also think about how you respond to the color of light, or if in fact that's even a factor for you. I'm pretty color-sensitive, so buying light bulbs is a fiddly little trial-and-error process of discovering which ones keep everything more or less the color I feel it's supposed to be and which ones suffuse my space with sickly yellow or green tints. Maybe you don't think of yourself as being particularly color-sensitive, but maybe I also just helped you understand why you respond to certain places in certain ways, eh? If you just feel weird about a particular room in your house and you simply can't figure out why, try messing around with the light bulbs - most bulbs these days will tell you if they give warm or cool light, and once you figure out your preference life gets a little easier.
(Sidebar: I understand why incandescent lights are being phased out and I pretty much agree with it, but god it's making light bulb shopping even more of a process than it already was. But then again I'm rather compulsive about these things)
With regard to light levels, by the way, another thing to consider is where you need your light to be. One fixture over your bathroom mirror is going to make shaving or eyebrow-plucking tricky in terms of visibility, whereas a relatively balanced light source on either side of the mirror will ensure that you can see everything you need to. Your living room, on the other hand, probably doesn't need to be flooded with light and might feel more comfortable with a few carefully-placed lamps. And again, this is not new information, but it really does have an effect on your overall sense of self. Any time we can spare ourselves some small irritation, for instance the irritation that comes from wanting to do nothing more than sit in a comfy chair and read a good book but you can't quite see well enough to do so, we create in ourselves just a little bit of general goodwill toward the world. And that adds up.
Feel-Good Friday tomorrow! Already! Good grief this week's gone quickly. But it is very nice to be back.
- Sarah
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