Do you ever think to yourself, "When I live on my own..."? No, I am not a child trying to question authority, as you would expect, I am a woman in my forties living with husband and children. The thought occurred to me late one night when prompted by my amorous husband, I decided to sleep in the buff. I discarded my normal routine of wearing long cotton pajamas even in the heat of July and donned... well, nothing and slipped between the sheets. The night started out well enough with a little romance and cuddling but as I dozed off, I realized that the object of my romance, my beloved husband, had the ceiling fan turned to high as usual and had not thought it necessary to tone down the air conditioning even one bit! I thought to myself, "When I live alone I will not have any ceiling fans"!
My struggle with ceiling fans is nothing new. I happen to be married to a wonderful man who grew up in the sweltering, smothering, muggy heat of Mumbai and there is one thing I have come to know about people from Mumbai, they cannot live a moment without a ceiling fan or some sort of air blowing in their face. I now have had the pleasure of living with several of his relatives from the same great city and each one of them has insisted on having every ceiling fan in the house turned on full blast 24 hours a day, 12 months a year. To me, sitting in a room with the fan blowing that fast is like trying to sit still in a wind storm. My wavy thick hair seems to get even more tangled, my low blood pressure system slowly stops bothering to pump blood to my extremities and I feel like the whole world is chaotic. My minimally decorated contemporary modern living room that looks tidy and serene suddenly seems cluttered and under decorated , my romantic and serene bedroom feels unwelcoming and my recreational basement feels like nothing more than a storage area when the fan starts blowing.
When I started thinking about this some more, I realized that the need for a fan blowing or not blowing might be a manifestation of something deeper. Why is it that I crave quite serene places. My best memories of a vacation are the serene, still mountains surrounding our beautiful hotel in Interlaken in Switzerland, how different those mountains seemed, the air seemed perfectly clean and still or fishing on a still lake in the Ozarks. I love holidays where I am in nature, hiking and constantly on the move but I don't want constant movement around me. Conversely, my husband seems to crave the beach and city vacations, where there is lots of activity around us, but the first thing he always does when we get to our destination is take a nap, with the fan or air conditioning on full blast, of course! This has ruined many a vacation for me, the first thing I want to do when I go on holiday is to drop my bags off in the hotel and go! Explore, find the best things to see, places to eat, meet locals and immerse myself in the atmosphere of the place. Why is it that he finds it necessary to be surrounded by activity to be relaxed while I find it necessary to be active to relax?
