A Birds-eye View Can Help You Soar

Cultivate new perspectives to live your best

My favorite room in our home has to be the kitchen. For starters, I waited more than a decade for the dream kitchen I saw in my mind's eye. Without boring you with unnecessary details, an ambitious renovation to add a second story to our historic home hit a few snags that left us with an unfinished kitchen space for longer than expected. It was entirely functional, just not with the finishes that, as designers, we envisioned and yearned for.

As with almost every unexpected detour, it was a blessing in disguise. It became a true test kitchen—we had the rare opportunity to live and work in the environment before finalizing the design, testing out our concepts in real time. We were in a perpetual state of evaluating, rethinking, redesigning…my husband even took to drawing our ideas on the walls to try out our new thinking. It turned out to be such a gift!

By the time we finalized our layout, cabinet designs, appliance choices, and finishes, we felt confident that it was the optimal design for our space and lifestyle. In fact, we were darn proud of ourselves. It has been a little over ten years since we completed the kitchen and I can say without hesitation that I absolutely love working in the space…it functions perfectly. It’s beautiful and timeless, the workflow is effortless, and everything is accessible and where it needs to be…except for one set of dishes.

The single flaw
We have a collection of mini ramekins in varying sizes that I regularly use for a variety of serving and cooking needs. Since we completed the project, they have been stored on a second shelf above a set of bowls we use daily, perfectly adjacent to the dishwasher. However, two problems have plagued me. First, I’m only 5’2” and the shelf is almost out of my reach unless I stand on my tip-toes or make use of a small one-step stool under the sink. I can get whatever is right by the edge, but if it is a few inches back, I have to grab the stool or my husband. Second, the dishes don’t nest well, so stacking is a little precarious. More than once, they have toppled on top of me, and a few have broken.

Though it’s hardly the end of the world, these darn little bowls have been a source of consternation for years. I often complained about the reach, and Andrea admonished the manufacturer for a poorly conceived design. I investigated getting a foldable 2-step stool to assist, and I even thought maybe we should give them away altogether and find new ramekins designed to stack.

A sudden epiphany and an easy solution
One morning as Andrea and I were emptying the dishwasher and I was doing my level best to put the little buggers away, out of nowhere a thought suddenly popped into my head. Six feet to my left, across the bay window, is the mirror of this cabinet. The precise same configuration just left of the sink. But unlike the little workhorse conveniently located over the dishwasher for easy access, we barely used it. It housed a scant soup bowl set and seasonal serving items.

I stood in front of the sister cabinet a mere six feet away, contemplating the contents of the shelves. I turned to Andrea and said “Why don’t we put the whole ramekin set on this first shelf, which we hardly use, and finally place them where we can get to them?!” All we had to do was move the seasonal items over to the top shelf, move the soup bowls up to the middleshelf, and that would open up a perfect spot on the bottom shelf for all the ramekins that we use daily.

We both fell silent, looking at the shelves, then at each other. Why on earth hadn’t we thought of this before? What was the matter with us? It took ten years of struggling and getting hit on our heads to figure this out?! We both laughed as we shifted the contents of the three shelves. As designers who pride themselves in developing out-of-the-box solutions for a variety of projects, we could not believe that we were so blind to a solution right under our noses… or across the sink.

Shining light on a blindspot
I have been ruminating on this experience for the last month. Andrea and I still find it comical yet perplexing that we were so deeply entrenched in our thinking—and not just for a brief period, but for a whole decade! I’ve been trying to understand why we had such tunnel vision. Typically, I am the one who tends to get stuck in ruts and be a creature of habit (sometimes to my detriment), but Andrea is usually better at stepping outside the box and looking at things from a different perspective.

This vexes me; I’m concerned this blindspot may be a harbinger for other, more critical issues, especially concerning health matters. This experience illuminates the necessity of mindfulness and critical thinking everywhere in life. Every time the little ramekin fell on my head, I knew I needed to solve the problem, but that’s where I stopped. It’s the age-old parable of the shoemaker’s children with holes in their soles.

Lost in the forest
Our mantra to clients is that creative problem-solving involves getting a bird’s-eye view. It’s human nature to miss the forest for the trees, but sadly, this never produces a solid solution. In our case, neither one of us put on our designer hats and rose above the proverbial tree line. We remained lost in the leaves and didn’t resolve a somewhat silly but ever-present issue.

This was a bit of a wake-up call for me. Rather than tackling the issue and employing critical thinking and problem-solving, I was uncharacteristically on autopilot, and this mental torpor is not a good thing. Staying mindful and proactive carries over to all aspects of life and is essential for health and well-being. Our physical and mental systems are interconnected and interdependent and function best when viewed holistically, above the forest…not just one leaf at a time.

Keep questioning, keep striving
It was a reminder to always remain curious and receptive to change. From what I see on the horizon, many notions around health that we have believed for decades will be turned upside down in the near future; we need to be aware and open to critically evaluate the torrent of new information and course correct where necessary. What? The food pyramid developed in the 1970s has been misleading millions of people? We shouldn’t eat five slices of bread a day? Our bodies actually need sunlight for optimal health? Wireless devices throughout our home and resting on our bodies may not be a good thing? Maybe plastics in our clothes contribute to microplastics in our bodies and affect our health? (Yes to all those, by the way.)

Additionally, it reinforced a goal to keep striving for better practices in many aspects of life. I have lots of conversations in my mind: how can my husband and I get more natural nutrition for optimal health; how can we eat more protein in a day; how can I maximize exercise; how can I simplify life to be less stressful; how can I be better organized; how do I carve out more time to be outdoors; how can I see friends more often; how can I sneak more healthy food into a stubborn now 18-year-old young man?

I know what you may be thinking…there is way too much to think about. It’s overwhelming. How can we possibly think of everything? We can’t. But what we can do, what is within our control, is to purposefully cultivate a more mindful, questioning, problem-solving mindset.

That’s what Andrea and I didn’t do. We were so locked into the habit of those little bowls being on that particular shelf; it was as if they were cast in concrete, and moving them simply didn’t cross our minds. We were trying to solve the problem of how to reach the ramekins; we entirely missed the more important question of where they were in the first place.

But then again, we didn’t stop to talk about it, let alone think it through. I’m confident that if we had taken the time to step back for a bird’s-eye view and problem-solve the situation, we would have arrived at the solution about nine years earlier—with a lot fewer broken ramekins.

Let’s soar above the tree line to live well, age great.

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