Thirty summers. You may not have more.

A good friend said it in passing, in a month already full of goodbyes. And in the middle of it that one sentence, like a stone dropped in still water: what are you going to do with the summers you have left?

It startled me. Not because of death; death I knew. But because of the answer that came up immediately: later. My time comes later. First the other person, first the commission, first that moment when things get quieter. As if I mostly live other people’s lives and keep my own for a someday that never arrives.

It goes deeper than that, into an old belief: that hard work is what makes you worth something, and that it is up to me to keep everyone else satisfied. From an early age I learned to feel first what someone else needed, and only then myself. From the outside that looks kind. From the inside it is an old route my nervous system keeps choosing, even when I know another one exists.

And things like that do not live in the rooms where visitors come. They live downstairs, in the basement. Underneath daily life lies a quieter layer, one that is less often visited. Down there stand things you never consciously put there, but which steer from below what happens above. The habit of making yourself small. The belief that rest has to be earned. The silent idea that your own life will begin later.

What you do not look at, you will experience as fate. Not loudly, but constantly. You notice it not in one big decision, but in a hundred small ones, in which you set yourself aside each time, until it no longer even feels like a choice.

Usually that door stays shut; life upstairs carries on. Until someone says thirty summers. Until a funeral reminds you that time is counted. Only then does it become worth going down and seeing who has been walking around there all these years, on your behalf.

A funeral, by the way, is not only loss. There is so much life in it too — people remembering, laughing, holding on to one another, a passage into something new. That is exactly what makes the question lighter and sharper at once: does what they would say about me match the way I live now?

I am already on my way down those stairs. For years I have been practising now instead of later. Not because it is finished — a nervous system learns slowly — but because I know what the alternative costs me.

That is what The Home of Soul is for me: not only making the rooms fit better, but going down the stairs once, turning on the light, and seeing what lives there. A home that does not only hold you, but gives you back your own life.

So this is what I leave you with this month: do you dare to go down into the basement of your house? What is walking around down there — and how many of your summers is it living for you?

Mariska Jagt — interior designer and founder of The Home of Soul