Renovating your Reality

It’s been a long, cold, ugly winter out there. Mountains of shoveled snow line the driveways and intersections; streets become frozen lakes when the water mains freeze and burst open throwing their pressurized contents upwards and into the frozen ice-world above like some Disney movie heroine struggling to find her identity; and as the season progresses the streets crumble and give way from below - the gaping potholes lie in wait to damage tires and rims and turn the daily commute into a trek across some Arctic minefield.

We've had enough.

That temptress Spring returned briefly last week, showing just enough leg and bare concrete to entice the winter-weary, stirring forgotten passions and lustful yearnings for garden centers and potting soils and just as quickly as she turned our heads she disappeared, taking with her our last, dying hope of getting through March unscathed.

The winter carnivals are over and gone, Spring break is on the horizon, and if you believe the calendar the new Season has officially arrived, but we know better, and we aren’t fooled, though we want to be.  The high school does its best to lift ailing hearts with Spirit Week and the annual career symposium, but we all know we’re stuck in that dreary in-between world, not quite where we want to be, and not quite free from the holds of our pasts, prisoners of time and place.  Cold and flu season adds insult to injury, robbing us of what little energy and motivation we have left, mopping running noses and soothing sore throats and coughs, mired in medications that dull the aches and pains.

And so we wait again.

The renovations are in full swing and progress has been plenty on all fronts – though this past week saw nothing moving forward until around Friday morning, thanks to a sinus infection that had me praying for a simple migraine to ease my suffering, but illness-induced rest and plenty of fluids and I’m almost feeling human again – enough to begin planning the upcoming week’s schedule and thinking about where I’d like to see this project in a week’s time.  The structure has been removed and replaced with engineered lintels to carry the roof loads as planned and we’re enjoying the increased space and abundance of natural light that had been trapped and blocked by the original house design. 

We’ve become accustomed to the chaos and upheaval that is construction – the missing areas of finished floor, the dangled wires and exposed framing, the relocated services and storage and the dance to find the things we need that are no longer where they once were.  And more than once each of us has turned the old direction to head downstairs and found ourselves standing in the middle of the kitchen like an Alzheimer’s patient searching for the unseen.  But we catch ourselves and turn the right way, the new way, and continue on, adapting to the new route and reinforcing the muscle and mental memory of how to navigate our own home.

Change is a grand thing if you can survive the transition period.  It has taken me a long time but I think I’ve finally begun to understand that critical life lesson.  While we are naturally resistant to it we crave it just the same and somewhere along that spectrum of same-different new-unknown, we each find our level of comfort and freedom to be who we are meant to be.  Understanding that each of us has varying levels of change tolerance is critical too for we can’t force others to accept change at more than their comfortable pace – though we can all grow and tolerate more change if we take our time and move forward slowly together.  It helps if everyone involved is on the same page and has the same vision of the future – but that relies on shared communication and mutual interests and we know how difficult it can be to get a group (never mind family) consensus on anything.

In the case of a renovation good plans and shared design sense are key to a harmonious transition from the old to the new and improved, else one of you is going to get what they want and have in mind and the other is just going to get what they get – now depending on which one of you ‘cares’ most about the outcome and whose level of unhappiness with the current state of affairs is greatest might dictate the direction and degree of change involved. There’s nothing worse than an apathetic stakeholder in the change process however – they’ll maintain and swear they really don’t care about the details along the way – despite repeated queries and assurances, but you know they’ll be the first to voice displeasure with the final outcome for any of a number of possible reasons: emotional inaccessibility, passive-aggressive tendencies, lack of commitment to the planned changes or pure bull-head stubbornness. 

Open, honest, shared communication is key. 

And really when you boil it all down, that’s true no matter what the nature of the change.  We know at our very basic core that we must change and grow in order to survive – that’s just the reality of being human – and accepting that fact can be scary and unsettling and it might bring out fears and emotional scars of past changes that didn’t work well or didn’t provide obvious improvements – but we can not stay where we are for any length of time without dying and withering in some way.  Preparation is key – we need to have a general understanding of where we want to get to before we begin or we won’t have any idea how to get there, or when we’ve arrived.

Funny how some of us forget that, and blindly dive into changing things around us for the sake of change; for the thrill and uncertainty of making things new and different around us, to live on the edge and push the envelop of safety and security we normally operate inside.  A new paint colour, new hair style, new relationship – you know who you are – anything to feel different than how we do presently, but without really digging deeper into understanding what it is about the current reality that has us feeling trapped or fearful or unhappy and in search of change.  Without knowing why you want change, and moving toward a vague, undefined goal, you are apt to find yourself in exactly the same mental and emotional state you left – just surrounded with new things and places and people.  And soon you’ll be looking to make another change…

Some of us are quite content to exist like dust in the wind, happily being thrown along life’s path, tossed and turned this way and that as situations and opportunities change and fluctuate around them, easily able to adapt to the new and unknown and seemingly able to thrive no matter where they end up.  Others prefer to live like rocks, anchored and stable and content to be just as they are currently, seeing no need for new and improved when the tried and true have been just fine, thank you very much, fighting even the most basic changes around them, clinging to the familiar.  Most however are somewhere between the two extremes, holding on here and letting go there, shifting from being in control of the change process to being changed by the process no matter how hard they fight it, struggling to exist between the two and make it work along the way.  We’re blind to it and don’t understand why we feel the stress we do, ignorant of the battle that rages around us constantly, not becoming an active partner in the process that will ultimately determine who we become and where we end up.

And so we curse our current situations and long for new and better and explain away our limitations to chance or location or outside influence instead of owning up to what we’ve done to get us to where we are today.

It will be a few more months until we can say we’ve entered the home stretch in these renovations; until we will be able to truly see the end in sight and begin to get excited about the future way we’ll exist inside the re-created and expanded spaces.  For now we’re content to see the progress in little stages bit by bit, knowing we’re heading toward something better and more able to suit the way we live in this house; something that will give us more room to be who we are and who we are becoming.

But just to be human, we’ll still find it easier to stand and look out the front window complaining that the temptress Spring hasn’t returned than to accept and embrace the cold reality of winter, shoveling be damned.