Reflections

OK, so we’re finally actually LIVING IN our new home.  Yeeehahhhh!!

It feels a lot better than the sense of living nowhere during the interim.  There’s still plenty of work to do and we’ve got friends coming over Friday for a Christmas gathering plus coming from out of town for Christmas and New Years, arriving in 2 weeks and staying for 2 weeks, but it’s all good (after all, WE invited them).

For me, having friends and family over is an important part of converting a house into a home, so I really don’t mind the work that comes with it.  As usual, it comes down to balance and making sure there’s also time for just me, and for just my wife and I.  And there is.

It’s finally starting to feel like I can settle into this new phase in my life.  I’m not talking about physically settling into the home – unpacking everything, buying new furniture, handling repairs and other things (although that’s part of it) – I’m talking about settling into all the changes that come with the new home:

• We’re in a new neighbourhood that doesn’t contain all the same charms and other benefits of the neighbourhood we used to live in (e.g. location vis-a-vis downtown, variety and proximity of the shops, etc), and that in itself is a big shift.
• We’re also living in a house that is different from the kind of house I envisioned myself in next, although that’s turning out to be fine.
• We’re making other changes to how we run our lives, and this has an effect.
• I’ve also made changes to my working arrangements and office space in the city.

It all adds up to significant and important change.  There are other life changes happening as well – positive, but significant.

What does all of this mean?  It means the past 4-6 weeks have felt pretty tumultuous.  The experience has felt great, terrible, easy, difficult, stressful, peaceful, exciting, crazy-making, fun, annoying, and a number of other things I can’t think of at this moment.  It just depended when you asked me.

The key has been to maintain perspective through it all.

Unfortunately I wasn’t always successful at doing that, but I adopted a couple of practices to help me. One was keeping in touch with good friends and talking to them about it; another was journaling about it when my mind was really racing; another was talking to my business/life coach about it; yet another was just putting it all aside from time to time and just going out for a nice evening with my wife or a friend.

Here’s wishing you perspective and balance through life’s changes.