More than Just Light from an Edmonton Lighting Contractor: Lighting that Boosts Security, Mood, & Pride in Your Home
It’s almost—even another beauty that they’ve never experienced. They’ll see the beauty of their home in the day: the colors, the different things like that. And then, with the lighting in the evening in the dark, the lights accent the shapes of their home as opposed to maybe the colors. And there’s a whole other beauty and appreciation for their homes in a way that they never thought possible.
So I want us to consider, for a moment, what it is that light does and how light makes you feel when you consider when you drive home from work in the evenings and what light can do to that. When you drive home and you see a beautiful array of lights along your house, your driveway is lit up, your walkway is lit up, your trees, your shrubs—we know how dark it can be for many months of the year. We leave early in the morning; it’s dark. We come home—come home from work—and it’s dark. And I think we even often recognize how that does affect our moods. We actually talk about it often; it’s often a conversation that many people have. And yet, we often really don’t do much about it or we don’t think there is much we can do about it. And I want to challenge that idea for a moment and recognize how much lighting can affect that.
Additional Light Adds Safety and Security
And so, yeah, when we do leave early in the morning and we get out to our vehicles and it’s dark and we can’t see anything—for many people it can bring a sense of fear or even hazard, can make you feel stressed out right from the start of your day. That is not the way we want to start our day—feeling stressed. We walk outside and we—it’s whether it’s slippery, as it often is here, and you can’t see where you’re walking, you can’t see what’s in front of you. We all know the worst thing is when you start your day off: you spill your coffee or you trip and you fall. And how even just something as light makes that so much better. How, when you go outside your home, if it’s lit up, the pathway to your car is lit up, you can see where it is you’re going, how much better that can make you feel.
And really, so much of life is about how we feel about the things that we do each and every day: from when we wake up to when we go back to sleep, when we’re at work—how do we feel about all these things? In a similar sense, like when you come home from work and you’re tired, is it dark? Is it dreary? Does it feel like the day is over? Does it feel like you’re about to just, uh, yeah—you have nothing really that you feel like you’re coming home to? Whereas when you do drive into your driveway and you see your house beautifully lit up, it—it stands out; it brings a sense of joy as opposed to a sense of dreariness and exhaustion.
Come Home to a Well-Lit House
We often neglect our day-to-day feelings and just put them off as the way it has to be, and yet we don’t really realize that there are often many simple ways that we can improve our day-to-day lives. And light is one of the best ways that we can do that. To start with, I want to address a few of the feelings that light and darkness—even in—in just the sense of your house, the outside of your house—can actually really affect you.
First off, there’s the sense of comfort or fear, safety or hazards, beauty or chaos, and rest or burden. And so, when we look at the first one—comfort or fear—when you drive into your driveway and it’s dark, typically that does bring people a sense of fear. They—they don’t—they can’t see anything and they don’t know, you know, if you’re backing into your driveway or pulling into your driveway, you can’t see what it is you’re, you’re going up to, yeah. There’s just—there’s not a sense of comfort. Whereas when there’s light, you can see what it is: you see your home, and you’re—you’re confident as you—as you pull into your driveway. And so you’re—you’re—you’re comforted; it’s—it’s your home; you know you’re there and you—you’re not worried, ’cause you can see what is in front of you. Even when you’re walking—if you get out of your car when you’re parking your car in your garage and you can see where it is you’re going—we know here how when it is so dark it can be—even as simple as that, it can be a difficult thing.
Additional Light Reduces Common Hazards
When we look at safety or hazard, it’s very similar to the comfort of fear, but the safety or hazard is like, “Yeah, is there something in the way? Is there something I’m going to drive over? Is there something I’m going to trip over?” Light brings clarity to that. Light brings a sense of safety when you’re driving, when you’re walking. I mean, this is why we even have lights on the freeways, because if we didn’t have that light in the darkness here, it’d be that much harder to drive with all the rest of the traffic and see where we are. And especially with all the snow we get here too—even in our own driveways, it’s easy to—to miss where it is we’re going. And light can—light can really drastically affect that.
And the third thing—beauty and chaos. Again, I can’t exemplify this point enough how much beauty affects us on a day-to-day and how much on the other side chaos can affect us. And when we’re—it’s dark, we can’t see things. There’s a sense of chaos: like things are chaotic—we don’t know where it is we’re going. And even in our homes, we just—there’s a sense of not knowing what we’re about to get into. It’s like, if you walk into your house when you come home from work and it’s dark and you just kind of like, “Oh”—you don’t even know what it is you’re about to see when you turn on the lights. Whereas when, yeah, your house is lit up outside—when you drive home, there’s just a sense of comfort and beauty that, yeah, a few other things can do: like the light, like lighting can do to your house and to your yard.
Lighting Can Make Your House Feel Like Home
And even in regards to rest or burden I think light gives a sense of rest—a sense of peace. We often neglect our feelings on a regular basis—the day-to-day feelings that we feel—because I think in many ways we actually don’t know how to deal with them. We don’t know if there’s any way to change the way we feel, whether it’s the job we have that we don’t like and then the money that we make, we don’t know what to do with it—to get us further ahead or to even bring us joy. And I think that is something we’ve really lost in society—that, I think, we used to often have, was a pride and a contentment in our homes. Even the sense of many people would often go to work, and when they got home there was a sense of pride and comfort that they had left for the day to do the work they needed to do, whether they loved their work or didn’t love their work, to come home to their home, to their family if they had a family, or even if they were single—to what it is that they had built and they had invested in, which is their homes.
I think for many of us our homes have become much less to us. We don’t really take pride in our homes the way we used to, and I don’t even mean that as a personal criticism but as something that I think of as just society—we don’t even understand anymore; we don’t understand the effect, how that actually makes us feel. And how, when we have a sense of pride—a sense of pride in having a beautiful home, how that makes us feel every day: from when we get up in the morning, we leave our house, we see it’s a beautiful home; it’s—it’s well lit and we know others can see that. It’s not even a sense of feeling better than someone else but just that we take pride in the things that we have in a healthy and a good way. And I think when we all do that, that’s when you see even entire blocks, entire streets where you see people building, they work together and they want, you know, nice yards and clean roads, clean sidewalks. There’s a sense of camaraderie, beauty, appreciation for the things that they have. And I think that is something that we can really capture through lighting.
Lighting lights up even in the simplest sense: lighting actually accents the home that you have. So if your home is beautiful, you don’t see it that often in the morning when you wake up or in the evening when you come home. And I think for many people, they even see when their houses are lit up—it’s almost even another beauty that they’ve never experienced. They’ll see the beauty of their home in the day: the colors, the different things like that. And then, with the lighting in the evening in the dark, the lights accent the shapes of their home, as opposed to maybe the colors. And there’s a whole other beauty and appreciation for their homes in a way that they never thought possible.
Contact Natural Light for a Quote Today!
And so, I just think it is so important for us to understand how light and how beautifying our homes can make us feel and how important that is day-to-day. It is the day-to-day, every day that you live, that matters most as opposed to one week a year on the—the grand vacation that you go on, which we all love, but you’re going to spend the other 51 or so weeks working, leaving in the morning, coming home in the evening. Let Natural Light Edmonton help you. Let us help you bring that extra degree—the start of that degree of beauty—to your home and to your life that you will have a sense of contentment, joy, peace, safety that maybe you didn’t have before. Anyway, thanks for watching—we’ll talk to you soon. Have a great day.