Feng Shui - A Load of Old Phooey?
Over the past few years Feng Shui or, if you wish to pronounce it correctly, Foong Schway has become an integral part of many people’s lives – both personally and commercially. I can see my fellow columnist, Ron Carpenter, holding his sides already. He’ll have a field day with this one. In fact, when I suggested covering the subject, he muttered something about the best position for a woman being chained to the kitchen sink.
I, on the other hand, am less cynical about the principles of this ancient Chinese art of luck management.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the subject, Feng Shui is all about the balance of energy and living in harmony with the environment. The laws of Feng Shui encourage you to improve the flow of energy (known as Chi) by arranging your own surroundings to attract prosperity, health and love, rather than loss, misfortune and isolation.
Each part of a building corresponds to a particular area of your life and before some smart arse pipes up, I know that the bedroom relates to sleep and that other “s” word and that the kitchen is associated with cooking, but that’s not what I mean. If your toilet, for example, falls within the wealth sector, you could be symbolically flushing your riches away, along with all those other nasty by-products.
However, for every Feng Shui “problem”, there is a cure. Since toilets are such bad news, except when you need to use one of course, the advice is to keep the toilet lid down and the door closed at all times. Try enforcing that law in a household full of males. Like most women, I consider an uplidded toilet seat bad news anyway, especially when the bathroom has been occupied for half an hour whilst my beloved reads the newspaper on the throne. Open lids facilitate the diffusion of that aroma known as Eau de Turd.
Unfortunately, my partner’s treasured sons took the “keeping the toilet seat closed at all times” a little too literally and we ended up with attractive puddles surrounding the base of the toilet. Well, that was their excuse anyway and nothing to do with lack of hand to hosepipe coordination.
Since sinks are also bad news, but a necessity nevertheless, the advice given in my Lillian Too book is to keep plugs in permanently, which worked well until the abovementioned little darlings left the taps on and we acquired a cascading water feature to merge with the pool of wee on the floor.
Needless to say, both of the toilets in our house – one on the ground floor and the other on the first floor - are positioned in the family harmony sector.
Whenever I point out to my partner that he can’t place a particular object in a particular area because it’s not Feng Shuically auspicious, he scoffs at me, with a derisive curl of the upper lip and tells me I’ve completely lost it, but obliges anyway, in response to a girly smile and a promise to serve his most basic needs later.
“How can the position of an inanimate object affect your luck?” he sneered once, shortly before he tripped headlong over his son’s grotesque Jabba the Hutt character, which had been left precariously in the middle of the utility room.
Now being a technical bod and also being employed by a mobile communications’ company at the forefront of technology, my partner of all people should be au fait with the ability of static objects to affect energy. I remind him frequently that buildings in dense urban areas block satellite signals and that clocks and watches are powered by quartz crystal, which for all intents and purposes, is an inanimate piece of rock.
I also remind him that since following the principles of this Chinese art or “twaddle”, as he likes to refer to it, and since enhancing the marriage sector of my house, I have been blessed with his presence in my life. Unfortunately, not having similarly enhanced the family harmony area in a propitious fashion, it also means that I have been plagued on a weekendly basis with his two errant and disrespectful sons.
Despite his scepticism however, my ever accommodating other half will acquiesce to most things and yield to my most whimsical requests, for very small favours in return.
“If it makes you happy and you believe that it will make us rich, then you just tell me what you want and where you want it.”
And so it has come to pass that he has obligingly extracted gigantic boulders of quartz from Scottish river beds and humped them back home for me, making only a brief comment about how his vehicle has altered status from a family car into a heavy goods’ vehicle. He has also strategically positioned lights, furniture, pictures and plant pots and allowed me to exercise creative judgement on the interior décor.
He even agreed to erect some organ pipe-sized metal Windchimes outside our front door, until the violent clanging on breezy nights threatened to induce a permanent state of insomnia, not to mention complaints from neighbours with ears like fruit bats, following which the chimes were hastily removed.
When I informed him that we couldn’t have a mirror facing the bed because it was bad luck, he said, “Well, that’s obvious isn’t it? I mean, catching sight of oneself first thing in the morning could make you have a heart attack and die. Yes, that would be unlucky, but it has nothing to do with Feng Shui.”
I first took a fleeting interest in Feng Shui during the final months of my marriage to my skinflint of an ex-husband, in the hope that a change in fortune would send a more benevolent model in my direction. After placing some wealth coins into the area governing abundance, he had an unfortunate accident involving the alliance of a heavy object and his foot, incapacitating him for a few days. Consequently, I had to do the weekly grocery run alone and wasn’t constrained by his parsimonious influence. That week was an extremely abundant one in the food department.
From that moment onwards, life improved dramatically. I cleared out all the clutter in my home, including the ex and symbolically made room for new, improved and exhilarating life experiences.
My current and extremely generous partner informed me that it created good chi if I walked around the house naked and rested my breasts on the back of his neck at regular intervals. This tip was, apparently, in one of my Feng Shui books. “It says here,” he announced in an authoritative voice, “that it’s good Feng Shui to have undulating hills behind you”.
Ah, so he’s actually succumbed to the influence of this “twaddle” and is taking a serious interest, I thought. That is, until he started spouting forth on the importance of symbolism.
“According to Lillian Too”, he grinned, “It is auspicious to place a dragon in the Eastern sector. In that case, if your mother ever decides to stay, she can sleep in the bathroom.”
