Every visual person I know is finds it painful to look at really ugly things. What constitutes “ugly” is, of course, entirely subjective. For me, it recently came in the form of a big shopping bag from Mood Fabrics, a New York City store famous for being the place Project Runway competitors found inspiration for their creations. When I bought materials for a project, Mood rewarded me with their best shopping bag.
It is sturdy and holds all my prototype iterations and materials at-the-ready, but I can’t bear to look at its glaring gold-on-black plasticky shine. To me, it’s seriously ugly, painful even.
But it is SO useful, I tried to figure out a way to make it work. Perhaps turn it inside out, like the Tyvek Fed Ex Envelope whose loud FED EX disappeared into discrete plain white? I had nothing to lose, so I tried it…
…
…And was pleased to see it morph into a eye-pleasing, curiously chic black and white bag.
Sometimes turning something inside out, or upside down, or on its side — looking at it from a completely different view — yields an unexpected answer.
That is so brilliant! And beautiful.
In the Yoga sutras, this could be a Pratipaksha Bhavana practice.
Ah, great! I didn’t know about that practice so looked it up here. In yoga, there is a useful method for promoting healthy thinking known as Pratipaksha Bhavana. The literal meaning of this term is “moving to the other side of the mansion” and it points to the mind’s ability to completely transfer its awareness from a negative object to another more positive one (prati-other, opposing; paksha-wing, half; bhavana-dwelling, home, mansion, being).
That’s exactly what I did: moved to the other side of the mansion.