Independence Day
There are few moments in life that are as momentous as buying your first home. I can say this now, as I sit in my own home, on the second morning after moving in. I got an early start, the sunlight streaming in the bedroom window, making me want to get up and go. The air is chilly but my tea is helping to keep me warm.
It’s a strange experience sitting in my own home, as an adult. My “parents house” has been my parents house for a while now, since the days of college, meaning that I’ve been a little homeless for a while now. Almost 2 decades really. The last time I felt this kind of association with a place was probably when I was still living at home as a teenager, and taking it all for granted. It takes a lot to look around the home of your birth and say “Wow! This is amazing!”. Not when you are busy being an angsty teenager. Living at home was great, but it came at a slight cost. I grew up “in” it. It was all I knew in my formative years. Like a fish in water, I never got the chance to see it anew. When you feel that a place in innately “yours”, there is a good chance you will miss out on all the wonderful things that surround you. As George Orwell told us. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” For instance the sense of history of a place, the idea that generations of people lived here, on this sliver of land and maybe even in this exact building, before you. The history that goes right back, threaded through undoubtedly formative times, certainly in Ireland’s case, is right under your feet.
Most importantly, in being so used to a place, you miss out on the chance to change, to alter your perceptions of what your life could be and the chance to make it what it needs to be. A big move has the potential to shake off the cobwebs and get a new perspective on time. In fact, I would say it’s one of the few times in life outside of travel where everything is new, and you are aware of it, and that is something that should be harnessed.
I’ve moved offices for work plenty of times in my life. That was always a great opportunity to clear out the filing cabinets and reorder the chairs. But it rarely came with a sea-change in mentality. Business was business, and business went on regardless.
Moving into your first home, your hearth, as an adult is a fantastic moment in time. It’s a time that needs to be captured. It’s a time to look at the shadows and flickerings of your day-to-day existence and routine and say “What can be different here? What is a new way to approach this and think in a new way. Nothing is stopping me, except me. Nothing needs to be the way it is.”
There have been moments of sadness amidst such conscious change too. I felt a regret that I didn’t have access to this type of change sooner, that “if this had happened X years ago, where might I be today?”. But life doesn’t work like that. Now I’m ready to see the change, and now it will have its greatest effect on me.
As with anything new, moving from the old means leaving it behind. It means that the life you had is altered in some way, the routine you built up, the environment that maybe inspired or provoked you somehow, is gone. The needle has been bumped out of its groove and is now playing a different part of the song, a part you didn’t expect to hear right now. If you accept that the music is still the same, and that your approach to the timing is just slightly altered, maybe you can continue to enjoy it? In fact, maybe this is the way it was always meant to be listened to.
The job now is to make sure that the new routine, the new way of doing and looking at things, the new way of noticing, is the best it can be.
As I finish writing this, the sun’s rays have moved shadows across the wall in front of me. The house still smells and feels somewhat like someone else’s house, but I’m sure that feeling will go with time.
We all use time, until time becomes invisible to us and starts to turn its back on us through lack of attention. But time changes everything. When last did you get a new perspective on time?
