Trust, let go, and make room for what's coming.
I've been house hunting for the past few months. House hunting is a heart-wrenching endeavor. Truly horrible. You see house after house that is absolutely not what you're looking for, but you behave yourself, go through the exercise of looking at every room, opening every closet door, and trying to believe you could possibly somehow make this one work.
Actual thoughts I've had while looking at absolutely-the-wrong-house:
- I could transplant three giant trees on the front side of the house to block the fact that's it's pretty much on the freeway.
- Clearing the cement out of a fireplace and chimney wouldn't be that difficult.
- Yeah, I can probably live in the oversized closet next to the kitchen, so my roommate could have the bedroom...
- Living next door to my company's IT offices might not be that bad. I probably wouldn't even notice.
And then one day, just a normal everyday unremarkable Thursday in May or a July Monday, you pull up to a house. Just a house. Maybe it has lilac bushes at the gate, or a clothesline in the back. Maybe you've driven by every month for years now on your way home, or maybe it was on the same street your grandparents lived on, maybe you rode your skateboard by it every summer on your way to the neighborhood park. And here you are now, all grown up and tired of looking at houses.
And then it's game over. You walk through that gate, and it's just. game. over.
You could say things like it blows all the other houses out of the water, or it just felt -"right"-, or until you saw this house, you had no idea how amazing houses could be. But the simple reality is, you just finally found something that was true. Something honest, something that didn't pretend to be something it wasn't, something that faces you straight on and calls you by name and says this is what I am and every part of me is worth loving.
When you find a house like that, you'd move heaven and earth to make it yours.
Not because of materialism, or jealousy, or possessiveness, or because it's a good investment. But because you belong inside of it, and it belongs around you. Because you walk through the air in that house and it's thick with visions. Not visions of what walls you'll have to knock out and showers you'll have to install for it to be livable, but of the nights on the front porch with old jazz playing inside and coming out through open windows. Of bright morning light coming through the bedroom windows. Of the dinner parties in the back with every good person you know. The house starts to make you a bigger person. Expanded, enlarged, enlightened. It grows your vision of what your role is on this tiny little planet.
You love the house because of what it makes you see in you.
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The hard part though is sometimes heaven and earth won't move, despite your best offer, and the house goes to someone else.
There's a recovery period of course. For a few weeks after, you compare every house you see to the old one... How many square feet did it have, and is this new one bigger or smaller? Which direction did the old one face? Could I recreate the backyard feeling, here? And then you cycle back through trying to convince yourself into other houses.
I had originally set out to say something here about killing the visions. About how in order to make room for the next wonderful house that's coming your way, you have to kill the visions of the last house, because every house comes with visions, and they're different each time, and you have to love a house on its own terms, for what it is, and for what visions you find there. And I supposed that if you got too hung up clinging to the old visions, you wouldn't leave yourself open to recognizing the new ones when they came.
But that's fake. The new ones come and they blow the old visions out of the water all on their own. They don't need your help killing them. All they need from you is your best and honest heart, and a willingness to put new wine into new bottles.
Four years ago I tried to convince someone that every loss is replaced with something better, something we'll be infinitely happier about, once the pain and sorrow of the original loss is gone. This sometimes seems like a ridiculous thing to think, and I'm not entirely sure anymore that I believe that happens for everybody. All I know is, it's been true for me.
I guess this could all be read as being about more than just houses. Maybe that's okay. For me though, it's just about getting over that Spanish Fork home, about the Corner House that made it happen. I suppose I'll be homesick for the Corner House a little while longer, and I suppose that's exactly as it should be.
