This week’s blog is a kind of rage, a frustration against myself. It’s because we’re finally about to agree an offer on our house. The one that we’ve been trying to sell for nearly 10 months. And yet, I don’t find myself in a state of joy, but rather, well, nothing. What’s it got to do with a puppy, you may wonder. Well, when you google images for ‘joy’ you seem to get, either:
- People in mid-air ‘jump’ positions, preferably kids it would seem, or,
- Animals doing cute things, apparently smiling, or,
- Words of wisdom.
They all connect to my point, but I decided to choose one with a cute puppy, because I’m also on a ‘waiting list’ for a puppy… which fills me with much joy and much of a sense of responsibility. However, let’s get back to the house. It’s been a very protracted, very stressful and immensely frustrating selling process, and I long gave up getting excited each time that someone wanted to view our old house, our home. I think, gradually, over time I’ve become disengaged with it, to stop me from feeling the disappointment and the frustration. That’s been effective, also because I’ve been master of that process for a lifetime, but it has a massive consequence. It kills joy. I’m sure that something gets knocked out of us (Brits, perhaps) when we ‘grow up’ that stifles joy. We begin to worry, we begin to think of the things that could go wrong, we warn ourselves not to get our hopes up, we tell ourselves we’re not that lucky, we say to ourselves we can’t rely on things…. we begin to not believe in the possibility of joy. We think of all the other things that stop the joy from flourishing, and so we suffocate it. This is why the images are what they are – kids haven’t got to the death knoll of joy phase, animals are not that complex and we ‘adults’ need words of wisdom in order to connect with The joy. It’s bonkers.
I want to be ecstatic. I want to skip around this house because someone loves our old house as much as we do. The buyers are a family – and the house really needed a family to make the most of it, the gardens are a delight for kids with the stream and the big shrubs to hide in.
I think I need to read Jostein Gaarder’s Through A Glass Darkly again. Time to climb on the rabbit’s ears and see the world as Cecilia might. Failing that in the short-term, I need to just get over myself and let out a “Yeeeeeh-haaaaaaah”.
Leave a Reply