Relative Something

Okay, so, I am in the middle of total disarray at home, due to the project to fix up the house to put it on the market… In many ways it is commanding the majority of my attention away from other, more pleasurable, pursuits. I am aware that in time, this period will be forgotten, replaced by the drama of a next adventure.

It takes extra effort to view the immediate stresses of life with perspective of the greater world around us. Doing so helps me to tolerate the disarray as a temporary inconvenience, even as it stretches from days to weeks. There are a great many hardships that make my situation appear rather luxurious in comparison.

Heck, it doesn’t even deserve to be framed as an inconvenience, if I were willing to go that far. I could embrace this with a purposefulness that sees it as my primary accomplishment. This is exactly what I am supposed to be doing: living in my little one-room “fort” that I have created, surrounded by the upturned legs of furniture stacked around me.

From that perspective, it is not something I would ever want to forget, but at the same time, it is not something I want to be talking about forever, either.

When you have opportunity to socialize with acquaintances, it would be awkward to try to present yourself at that moment by including the full gamut of experience you have lived. We quite naturally become an amalgam of our life-experiences, and can’t help but present that version of ourselves to the world of people with whom we interact. But it seems to leave out so much.

At the same time, imagine trying to consume the full range of life experiences coming at you from every other person in attendance. It would be impractical.

Plenty of people have already lived through the very same phase of home projects that I am going through right now. Like many things in life –buying a car, raising a child, caring for elders, interviewing for jobs– the mere mention of the subject brings a nod of recognition and understanding.

There are also less common experiences, which fade into our past –saving a life after witnessing an accident, working in a forest paradise in Portugal, donating stem cells to an ailing sibling, standing in the high Himalayan mountains of Nepal– and which go on to become invisible threads of a distinct personal history.

Living in a confined space, surrounded by stacked furniture is a phase I probably will appreciate differently, after it is done and, hopefully, replaced by something with a more comforting feng shui.

I look forward to that, but for the moment, I will think of life in this current disarray as what I am supposed to be doing.