By now you've seen the words RightSIZE UP plastered in a lot of places here on the LowellHOME pages. That's because I'd have never stepped out of the shadows, where I love being and return back to the public eye had it not been for the remarkable 6 years I spent writing my latest (7th) book...you guest it..RightSIZE UP.
For awhile I'd entertained publishing the new book through the same traditional channels I'd always had. In fact, it was on many of those national booking signing tours where I'd been blessed to met so many of you. We held eachother's hands, hugged and told each other our stories. You all championed my years on TV trying to help you reconnect your personal creativity GPS back up. You told us about how finding your core through creativity changed so many of your lives. As I always responded, I had nothing to do with the fact that you were open and trusting enough to listen. It wasn't me who found the courage to (under the guise of interior design) embrassed your newly found creativity and used it to rekindle faith.
As many of you know I left in the middle of the economic crash knowing that when we all reconnected, life would look very very different. Just how different? Well I needed to know not just for you all, but for me too.
I myself, had gone from 20 years, living a creative life in the arts where I'd owned vertically nothing and liked it that way. Then through the TV show years, we'd accumulated warehouses full of stuff in order to do the very real makeovers we were so renouned for. When I left LA and moved to Santa Fe NM, I brought only a fourth of it thinking I'd purged well--happy that so many women's shelters would benefit from all that stuff left behind. Over the ensuing years I began to research, curious about what happens when an entire nation used to so much, is forced to reprioritize. I developed my think tank Consortium POV as a way to bring in a lot of voices needed to get a clear perspective from all elements of 'lifestyle.' I met with experts to examine why, letting go and purging is so hard for humans who tend, by nature to be natural hoarders. I asked theologists if the nature of God had changed, I asked everyday people if they were really happy? No stone was left unturned.
As the facts started rolling in, it became quite clear that we as Americans we're reaching epic tipping points on so many fronts.
As I continued cataloging statistics, writting and interviewing from my lovely home in Santa Fe, I began to realize that I too clung to far more than I actually needed. I too was paying to keep things rarely used. I too had a storage space there, full of treasurers I'd not seen in literally years. I too had a home built to entertain at least 12 in perfect and grand comfort, when in truth no more than four people had been in the house ever at one time since I left LA. This put in motion my own Rightsizing. It was far different than the traditional downsizing because it was far more personal than I'd have ever suspected. It was then that I began tracking my own process and adding what had been missing from the book...real soul-searching truth and then a new physical plan that matched that emotional state that seemed insurmountable. I began to realize that RightSIZING (as I would now call it) bared little to the idea of just getting rid of unwanted or even unused things. To Downsize the RIGHT way, one had to first have a vision of what the next phase of one's life could and should look like. Wait, What?
Now, I'd reinvented myself many times but never with so much stuff nor having been a bit famous as of all things and #^%$# interior designer! Now after years IN the TV interior design business, I'd gotten to hand pick the best of the best...imagine? Everything was special, some even historic and irreplaceable. Celebrities I'd flagged as heros to me, had gifted me with things special to them. OMG!!!
I had some real soul searching to do because I couldn't move forward until I had a vision of where. Otherwise, it's like packing for a vacation without having identified a destination. Then I realized why having the life one really want's is harder than I'd ever imagined. Well I share all of this in the book and on may pages here too. So in efforts not to be redundent in the end, I left on a collage campus speaking tour for a year with only what would fit in the back of my SUV. Everything went into consignment. Bye-bye now!
So now with the book done, I met with "the publisher." Having made copious notes on the chapters I'd given her, she asked if I could keep politics out of the book. That of course was like asking me to write a cookbook without ever mentioning food. It's the politics that in fact, has pushed over 156 million American people (on both sides) to all wake up at the same time and have the courage to redefine a lifestyle that is less suseptable to man's continual need for wealth and power. It's the last tipping point that herralds what all in the know are calling the seismic shift... which of course is exactly what the book is about. But don't worry it's not about people in politics it's about the accumulated residual effect of the eroded American ideology.
The conversation got worse and in the end what I think was asked for out of pure fear was a fluffy "be happy and decorate" book. Seriously? Meanwhile in the next breath, they desperately wanted the book and why not? My past six had been best-sellers. Well, I might make an alliance with a publisher but I decided then and there, that I would build a website that would deliver the somewhat weighty and vital information in hopefully the most practical and entertaining way possible through inspiration and the right motivation.
We have an opportunity to change the equation and finally begin to put quality of life first. I've lived it. Especially we Americans have the right to live in this country by its constitution with dignity and the aim of redefining what quality of life really means...just far more individually then we ever have---that's all....and that's huge!
Yes, I'm just now begining to look for a house again. But this time I'm going to do it the RightSIZED way based on my own dang book and all the information I make available to you here because I can tell you now that big is no longer better. Because I've purged and lived simply and with more meaning, I know just what I need now and do not...and I don't mean a tiny house on wheels. I'm not an Elf. I want spaces I use every day with things I use every day and I want the best of those fewer things because I'll now be able to afford them.
Living well and stylishly will be my greatest revenge and my new passion! A place to write, dream, feed my soul and work on getting you the best information I can as together we reshape the very idea of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.