Rocks and hard places by the sea

The sky was a brilliant blue yesterday and utterly cloudless, but still we were caught in the perfect storm. The current house isn’t selling; the market here has gone dead quiet. The new house, however, is still merrily acquiring new expenses; yesterday we came home to $13000 worth of bills. Careful readers will notice this as A Bad Combination. The kitchen is in and nearly finished: the final bill will come when it’s done. The windows, which were supposed to be installed yesterday, will likely be installed today: the final bill will come when they’re done. The plumbing/ electricity/ painting/ pick-your-service are all nearing their completion. They will soon be finished—as soon as the next two or three weeks. The final bill will come when they're done. The old house is still not sold. Last time it went on the market, it sold in a day with three offers. Ahhh, that was a nicer world to sell a house!

We are watching the emotions move through us: hope, panic, despair, resignation, regret. Which choices would we go back and undo if we were given a magic wand? Which moves would we unmake? I cannot yet bring myself to regret the purchase and renovation of the new house; I am still too head-over-heels in love with it to imagine wishing it not mine (even with the renovation at twice what we had expected). Instead, I wish the old house away. I can point to the day I wish we had back, the day when I thought I was getting out of the purchase of the current house but wasn’t. I have gone back and unpulled that thread in my mind, imagined waking the next morning to find that the house had gone to the second-highest bidder, sighed and resigned myself to finding another place, maybe renting for a while. What would happen if I could go back and unwind that part of my life’s tapestry?

I keep bumping up against Buddhist principles and stories about good and bad outcomes. At which point do you decide which decision is good and which is bad? This morning, talking it all over with Michael, I said, “Well, it’s easy to tell which decisions were the right ones in hindsight.” But which hindsight? How far back do you need to go to decide which ones were right? My father’s father, as a young man, decided against getting a job as a writer because it paid $10 less (a week? A month?) than the job he took—which was less interesting and at which he was less good. He regretted that decision for his entire life, talked about it into his 80s, handed it down in family mythology as a warning: do not do this terrible thing. At his 80^th birthday, he stood in front of family and friends with a huge smile, aware that he had never reached his potential in his career—and that he had lived a life with seven children and 19 grandchildren who adored him. What would have happened if he had taken the job? Maybe he’d have been a failure at that one too. Maybe he would have begun to drink more often and more violently, as journalists sometimes do. Maybe he’d have been so successful that he’d have not had the last four children, sticking with only the first three—eliminating not only those children but their children and their children’s children. Or maybe he’d have done just fine, been relatively unchanged, chugging adequately along at the newspaper job and then moving on to something else, and the only difference is that he’d never have told the story in the first place. His not telling that story would have changed my life. Who knows how.

If we had not bought our current house, maybe, when it was tough to sell the house in DC and I was beginning a serious panic about moving, we wouldn’t have sold that one, would have pulled back on the whole move-for-a-chunk-of-time thing and rented something here. Maybe, when times were much harder in the early lonely days, we’d have scurried back for the (emotional, at least) safety of the US. Maybe we’d have tried to sell the DC house now in this terrible market there. When you pull at a single thread, there’s no telling what unravels.

Which is why the Buddhists tell us to live for today, to take happy and sad as simply what happens to be experienced at the moment. Today we are cycling through many emotions. Shall we feed the panic and regret? I think instead we celebrate two houses which can be filled with people we love, a beach with sugar-fine sands, and healthy and happy children. And we will look out of our new windows at a new horizon, and give thanks to whatever forces in the world have brought us to this moment, with these people, and inside these four (or, if you want to count all of our property, eight) walls. Breathe in the air around you and rejoice in it all. As the rancher in the South Island told us last month: you’re a long time dead.