Sunday journalling prompt

On personal sustainability

This week, we admitted to ourselves that it’s time to move house. As is common for us, the decision was glacially slow. We thought about it six months ago, and then retreated into our little shells and decided to drop the whole thing. We love our house. It has always felt just right for us, and most of all, it’s home. But the problem is, we need an extra bedroom, and ideally an extra workspace too. We are bursting at the seams, and there’s only so much you can achieve with tidying and clever storage solutions. Something has to give.

But before we made that choice, we went on a hundred wild goose chases to avoid the change. We looked very seriously into building a garden office, and also an extension on the kitchen, and a loft conversion. All of those things would have been nice, but they might have killed me in the process, given that I cannot tolerate noise, chaos, or people in my house. Reluctantly, we started planning for a move. 

This is how decisions are made in our house: there’s an expansive phase, and then a retreat, and then we move outwards again, perhaps a little more cautiously. It’s a classic Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The synthesis, in our case, is that I have stopped dreaming about houses that are vastly beyond our price range and miles away from Bert’s school. It’s progress, of sorts. 

There’s also a particular dynamic in our house: I am always the one who suggests the change. I don’t think H has ever willingly chosen any change at all, but then, when it comes, he often copes with great stoicism. I am a dreamer. I’m interested in the first 50 per cent of any change, but then my interest in the whole thing slumps. I like possibility much more than I like reality. Somehow, we move forwards, but it often feels much slower than everyone else. 

So today, right in the middle of it, I thought we might work on our approaches to change.