The View to the Left
For anyone who thinks they need to be tidy to be whole.
In the spring, I stood on a hill in Devon and took two photographs.
The first looked exactly as a Devon postcard should – rolling fields, soft green light, hedgerows stitching the land into neat patches. It was the kind of view that makes you breathe a little deeper, certain you’ve stumbled into perfection.
Then I turned just slightly to the left.
In that second photo, the postcard dissolved: broken machinery, an old car, a tangle of metal and pipes; a mess. The sort of view we crop out. But it was the same place. Same light, same hill, same me standing there with my bottle of water in my hand.
It made me think about how we hold those two truths in everything – the perfect version and the messy one. How often we long to be the first while living in the second?
I took both photos to remind myself of something I keep forgetting: the mess creates the perfection. The tractors, the mud, the tools, the noise – all the untidy effort that keeps those rolling fields looking effortless.
It’s the same in the kitchen. When I cook something lovely, I inevitably destroy the peace and calm. There’s turmeric staining the counter and lentils spread across the hob. But it’s the chaos that creates the moment at the end – the meal, the warmth, the sense that something good came from the mess.
And it’s the same in the creative process, or any kind of growth. We want to skip straight to the part that looks serene, but that’s never where the life is. The messy middle – the trial, the error, the starting again – is the work.
With writing, the first draft is the heap of tyres. It’s scrappy, awkward and raw. Then I’ll read Mary Lawson or Anne Tyler and see what looks like clean, clear fields — prose so natural it seems to have grown there on its own. But even they must have had their machinery stage: the clanking, the reshaping, the mud on their boots.
Perfectionism whispers that we should wait until everything looks like the first photo before we start – before we invite someone in, before we try the new thing, before we call ourselves ready. But joy, I think, lives in the second one. In the making, not the made.
The view we hold in our heads – the rolling fields – only exists because of all the unlovely work happening behind the hedge. The piles of effort and self-doubt and starting over again.
Maybe it’s not our job to hide the machinery but to bless it – to know that the messy part is the process, and the process is the point.
So this week, if your kitchen’s a disaster, your project half-formed, or your life feels less postcard and more scrapheap, just know you’re standing in the right place. You’re simply looking a little to the left.
And if you’re hung up on a perfectionist trait that won’t let you go - life coaching can help you get clear on how it’s holding you back and how to turn it into a super power. More information on this HERE
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Before I moved onto my narrowboat I lived in rural Devon, and this view was very familiar.