(A bit of a brain dump follows, it’s a bit scatter-brained but I’m sure you’ll cope)
No floor plans for today, I’ve gone far enough with them for now. In fact, I’m taking a week off from house things for sanity reasons. Everything came to a head last night (Sunday) and I’m feeling rather flat today. Something good did come out of last night’s brouhaha, though. A moment of clarity. Where I need to focus.
The thing is, I’m obsessing over this house thing. I loathe living in our current house, and it makes me desperately unhappy, something I’m very used to and – sadly – have just accepted as being the norm. The future holds a new house and new life elsewhere, something that can’t come soon enough. In order to get to that future, we need to be in the right frame of mind and have enough money to make it happen. Currently, we don’t have either, so we’re stuck here for a while.
I don’t like it here, and Cooper Acres is my escapism. I hadn’t realised it before yesterday, but it’s a dream. Rather, it’s a dream that, if I don’t control it, will become an obsession. It will happen, it’s not purely a pipe dream, but it needs to fit into my life to such an extent that I don’t become blinded and other things suffer as a result.
I have no real love for the past or ancient history, and I tend not to dwell on personal experiences that have already happened. Insert your cliché of choice here, what’s done is done and I can’t turn the clock back. With my apparent ambivalence about the past, I like to think I’m a forward-looking and/or progressive person. I care more about stuff that’s going to happen than stuff that’s already happened, broadly speaking.
But here’s the rub: I can’t influence the future. The future hasn’t happened yet and the future I’m thinking of is years away. And I can’t influence years away. I can, however, influence now. I haven’t given much thought to the present – not for any sinister reasons or wanting to procrastinate, it just didn’t enter my mind as being important. But it is. I was wrong.
Concentrating on the things happening now will directly or indirectly affect our future, and when this future comes around, it’ll be the present. Which I can influence. Keeping my mind in the present and not worrying about the future will help things around here, which will make us happier & more productive, which will make us Oprah-rich in a shorter timeframe, which will allow us to move house. It’s all connected.
With that in mind, this week is all about making the current situation better now, and not in x months or years time. No plans, no wiggling around with boxes and sharp intakes of breath when I see build costs, no getting freaked out by the sheer enormity of what’s going on, just solid stuff to get back on track and – dare I say it – get my life together.
Baby steps, right?
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