This Old House



There’s always something that goes bump in the night when you buy a new home. Or an old home, as the case may be. In California, any house that’s built before 1960 qualifies as an OLD HOME, heck in some parts it could be classified as a historic landmark because we tend to have short term memory when it comes to history out here in the mild wild west.

We’re in the process of learning about our old girl and establishing a triage of what needs to get fixed first. But despite how organized we want to be with our lists, spreadsheets and budget projections there’s always the expected BOOM that gets our immediate attention. This morning we woke up to the sound of running water … Lots of water … as we jumped out of bed and dashed to the patio door we saw that the utility sink out back was over flowing. My boyfriend was quick to trace the problem to the water softening device and he shut off the water promptly as I unclogged the catch that was blocking the drain. A.M. crisis diverted.

Little did we know that the water show was a double feature and the P.M. river runs through it would begin as we were unhooking the old dishwasher in preparation for the a new delivery in the morning. Long story short … there was water spraying all over the floor, not to mention some live electrical wires. Fortunately we knew right where the main shut off was for the house and we didn’t need to load the animals onto the arc. Much praise to YELP where we found an after hour plumber who was here within the hour to fix the water main. Peering under the sink, the technician said confidently “I have an anal stop in the back of my van, be right back.” This delighted my teacher of the year daughter to no end, no doubt we’ll be enjoying a thousand variations of that call back for months … who am I kidding .. YEARS to come.

In between the monsoon season, my disordered nervous system had plenty of time to fret, fuss, fidget and other F word explicatives about how “I” couldn’t handle it. How my body and mind were already on overload and my dysautonomic body was the definition of dysfuntional. But as a dear friend pointed out to me tonight, it wasn’t that I couldn’t handle THIS crsis … it was that my mind was projecting a thousand variations of the future that I could not handle and THAT was where I was getting caught up in the vortex of the dishwater as it was circling the drain. As Eckhart Tolle writes in The Power of Now (p.41) “You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection – you cannot cope with the future.”

Low Hanging FruitDeep breath. Not because its the last breath you will take as the flood waters are rising, but because each breath brings our attention right back HERE, to this moment. Freedom (peace, serentiy, abundance whatever that “it” is that each of us seek) can not happen in the future … it can only be tasted when we pick the fruit directly off of the tree and place it to our lips — right now.

Who would have thought that even an old house could be such a wise teacher?

 

 

 

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