Introduction

A hyggelig house in Humlebaek, Denmark.

Pen-and-ink illustration by the Author

“It’s hard, but patience makes more tolerable that which it is impossible to correct.” - Horace [1]

Patience and forbearance are definitely essential qualities in dealing with the pandemic. Sensible people are suspending their natural behavioural impulses, to ride out the worst of the situation for as long as necessary, or until a remedy materializes.

But patience alone won’t sustain us. No matter how responsibly we behave, and how fervently we wish it to be so, the condition we may faintly recall as “normality” will not return. We are all passing through a one-way portal into a different world.

The nature of this world will be much like the one we have always known, but with significant alterations, especially to the ways we conduct our everyday lives. Through lockdowns, social distancing and stay-at-home protocols, we have already learned how to accommodate these changes to our homes and communities. But how long will these accommodations be required? And how will our habits be reflected in the way our domestic environments are designed and used?

There is a positive answer to these questions. Consider Collin Ellard’s description of accommodation, and his explanation of how we should think about:

The crux of accommodation is that it normally brings together two things: ideas – notions or even sensory experiences – that are contradictory. The only way to our feelings of contradiction, the “at-oddness” of the experience, is to adjust what we thought we knew of the world, and sometimes on a grand scale. [2]

Ellard, along with many others, suggests that we are now being exposed to a new level of awareness concerning the world we inhabit. One critical and inherent piece of this awareness is our innate need for shelter. More specifically, our current requirements for accommodation have meant that we learn to become more comfortable at home.

Sociologist Thomas Crosbie describes this pleasant condition using the Danish word hyggelig. “Is your house nice and cozy? Do you like being there? He asks. “Then it is hyggelig.” [3] He explains that hyggelig marks the difference between our current Canadian feeling that we are stuck at home, and the characteristic Danish feeling that at-home coziness is something to be cherished. In Denmark, he adds, “The Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) that plagues young Canadians is thus far an unknown phenomenon.” Furthermore,

By reframing the meaning of staying at home in positive terms, we may help soften the blow of quarantining measures while also increasing compliance. Stay home. Be cozy.

We may not all be in a position to heed Crosbie’s advice, but it may help us, if only a little, to consider the benefits of accommodation, in every sense.

NOTES:

1. Horace, Odes, 1. 24, Ode to Quintilius, publ. 23 BCE

2. Colin Ellard. Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2015

3. Thomas Crosbie. “In the fight against COVID-19, Canada could take a page from Denmark’s ‘cozy’ quarantine,” The Globe and Mail, April 20, 2020