So we are listing the house tomorrow. I have felt this overwhelming drive to finish all of the small details of weeding and cleaning, painting etc, that seem to accompany such an act, and so until yesterday, it really had not yet settled with me. It's big. Scary almost. I know that the math it right, that selling the house is the most reasonable course of action, and yet there is this large hold still over me. Like the sum of the land and bricks own me, and I feel almost as if I am betraying my duty.
Of course selling a house you have owned for 8 years is not the same as leaving a family homestead, or abandoning some local of long time historical significance, but I feel like I understand a little better those physiological and psychological forces that tie us to the dwelling we call home. There is almost a moral obligation, whether socially ingrained or innate I am not sure, but the source of the hold seems the same. There is a desire, to work to make a space better than you found it, to improve, and to see those improvements remain. Letting go means releasing all of those hours of work to another, and trusting them to be a good steward of the space.
Therein lies another problem. Trust. Do we trust the average person to be a good steward, to care for land, or even just the laminate floors. For me at least, not really, and I think it is the same for Amanda. It seems that the economic model we feature today, does not correlate with these learned and inherited behaviors of a simpler, slower time. The truth is that everybody has two or three jobs. I think humans are meant to be busy, don't get me wrong. We are happiest when fulfilled and busy with work. This may be more so true of Western civilization, where agrarian living has been our dominant survival strategy for hundreds of thousands f years. Work hard, eat well.
But now we have jobs jobs, not just the all day pursuit of improving the family / or community space. Now we have suburban housing tracks and 9 to five jobs, and have to maintain monolithic dwellings on the side. There is little time to play an instrument, or paint, or write a story, or to just daydream about the world. It is hard to make a living as an artist, or as a creative enterprise, so you have to get creative with how you make your plan, and for us the secret is needing less, to become less dependant on a corporatist capital scheme that churns through people, find a way to not need those things long enough to forge a new path, forge a new opportunity.
Although this all makes logical sense, some evolutionary trait, forgotten by the morning traffic jam, came bubbling up when my hands went into the dirt the first time. Obligation to leave the earth better than I found it. In the end, I think I can do that better by walking away from one house, but what tomorrow brings, nobody knows.
