I may have figured out the cause of some of my emotional and mental whiplash. It goes like this.
Past: we lost our home and I spend a lot of time thinking about what things we once had so I can plan to replace them, how the rooms flowed and what routines we had in order to better plan our future home. I also seem to look for something every day that I can’t find… our cheese grater, a toy SG wants to play with, a pair of shoes. They are either still in a box in the attic or we lost them. It’s hard to know if I should purchase something or wait until we move in a year to see if it turns up.
Present: we are in a rental house, which requires its own maintenance and routine. There are quite a few of our possessions that are in the attic here because of the effort it took to pack them up. I don’t want to unpack big mirrors that are wrapped in blankets just to have to repack them when we leave. It leads to a sort of temporary, in limbo existence.
Future: now that we have our city permit, the builder is ordering the first of our selections and we are moving forward with the second phase of our options. This is intense design work. It means thoroughly imagining each space: flooring, wall covering and color, ceiling design, lighting placement, and thinking through function, aesthetics, and how it will all flow together. It means pulling out magazine pages and saving ideas to Houzz room ideabooks. It means driving all over the city to various showrooms, meetings with our designer to sketch and then re-sketch the spaces. I spend a lot of time living in our future house in my mind.
Past, present, and future overlap all the time. It used to be that the main work was the resolution of losing what once was. There was a huge focus a few months ago when we were preparing the spreadsheet of our losses for tax purposes.
Now much of my energy and mental focus is spent planing for the future. When I’m shopping for a sofa, I’m thinking of what we used to have, what would work for the short-term rental house, and what the future space will need.
Sometimes it’s so much simper not to think of any of it!
