Acclimating to Permanence
It’s been a while, let me catch you up.
A while ago I wrote about Everything Being Temporary, in that post I talked about learning that I was leaving my job, I talked about leaving my apartment of 3 years, I talked about sunflowers. So much of our lives we spend acclimated to impermanence, fleeting feelings, locales, and occupations. Permanence becomes a foreign concept.
But what happens when we are thrust into it?
We Bought a House
This is still weird to say, let alone write, but we bought a house. We braved the fiery pits of hell known as the current housing market, and got extremely lucky on a private sale where we did not have to outbid corporate investors.
We bought a house. Now what?
Part of why I haven’t posted since the last day of school is because we have spent most days, even before moving, working on the house. Paint, carpeting, scraping off horrible pink and green bathroom wallpaper, and subsequently repairing the wall after I tore off huge swaths of drywall.
We packed, we moved, we watched as 20-something-year-old movers continually dropped our things coming out of our storage unit. Slowly, between watching my daughter, and unpacking, we moved in.
Now what?
The neighborhood is very quiet. Where we were living before, we couldn’t keep our windows open at night because there were always things happening, loud neighbors, police sirens, revving of engines. Now, at night, it’s silent. Even as we go for our family walks in the mornings, the streets are empty, occasionally we see someone mowing a lawn. The prevailing sounds are rustling trees, birds, the crunch of sticks and mulberries under our feet. Normally I’d be thrilled. But this isn’t a forest, I’m not alone by a lake with only the people I wish to surround myself with, I’m in a suburban neighborhood, surrounded, somewhere, by strangers. At our old place we couldn’t go for a walk in the neighborhood without running into people we knew, our dogs on first name basis.
Our house itself is lovely, like a blank canvas we get to make our own. We learned that my wife is far better at painting rooms than I am, and really most other handy things as well. As we go through room by room, unpacking, setting things up, making our to-do lists, picturing our lives here, our future, it hits me: this is permanent.
Acclimating to Permanence
I have lived in apartments since I was 18, occasionally living with my parents for brief “pit-stops” between semesters, apartments, student teaching, and while we house hunted. I have always kept a stockpile of boxes, ready for the next move.
Like sunflowers, the impermanence was understood, and appreciated during each bloom. Bad roommates, I can move! My landlord is doing construction downstairs, let’s get out of here! Now, it’s all me. If the laundry machine breaks, I have to pay to fix it. If there’s something I don’t like, I have to either take care of it myself, or ignore it.
In a perverse way, I have enjoyed the transience, in the same way that I dread it’s sudden disappearance. Sometimes it’s easier to pack up and move on, than to address problems, work hard on important things. Make improvements.
My brother got married recently to a woman he’d been with for a fairly long time. In some ways it felt like a formality, they already had kids together, had lived together for years, were married in every sense except for on paper. I asked him afterward how it felt, and he told me it was weird. He said, really nothing has changed, but suddenly it feels like everything has changed. He said, I was never going to leave her, and knew I wanted to spend my life with her, but now it feels real, more permanent.
Maybe there was a comfort in that official piece of paper, maybe there’s an added pressure, a voice over your shoulder telling you not to mess this up, especially now that the government is involved!
When Rebecca and I got married it felt much the same way. I had decided long before I wanted to spend my life with her. But then I said, “Til death do we part” and everything changed (mostly for the better).
I knew I wanted a house, and then we moved in.
Permanence adds pressure. It’s so much easier to be temporary.
Every job I have had thus far I have known would be temporary. But this next one? I could retire there. That means I have to be the best damn teacher I’ve ever been.
The Upside of Permanence
My neighborhood will change with time, and now time is something I have.
Nothing needs to be perfect right now. I want new floors in the basement, I want to renovate our kitchen. We have time.
When a problem arises, I’ll fix it. I own this.
I’m finally throwing out my boxes.
I’m accepting the challenges.
Of Course I Need a Nature-Related Metaphor To Wrap This All Up
Just outside my window is a well-grown oak tree. The tree is healthy and beautiful, shading much of our house. But if you notice, about half way up the tree in this picture, the electric line is wrapped around the trunk. The line weaves through limbs, at one point a fork of a limb is cradling a section of line. On the main trunk you can see a little bit of pressure, tension against the electric line. This tree probably grew up around this electric line, and over decades has grown into the line. The tree has still grown, been healthy, but even something as old and steady as this tree, will likely need to be altered for the electric line (or better yet, maybe the electric line can be moved? I’ll call the village.) If it continues to grow, maybe a few years, maybe another decade it can snap that wire. If there’s a big storm, it’s possible the limb can break and snap the whole thing along with it.
My point?
Just because something is permanent, doesn’t mean it can’t change. Things grow, alter. Because, the fact is, nothing is permanent, not really. Change is a constant in life, in nature. So while matter is never created nor destroyed, its state changes. Even in permanence there is comfort in the transience, a beauty in the moment, an appreciation for each fleeting feeling, locale, or occupation.
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