Hi Diane

I’ve always like the 2001 Movie Life as a House. 

I always thought of myself as a house. I was always what I lived in. It didn’t need to be big. It didn’t even need to be beautiful. It just needed to be mine. I became what I was meant to be. I built myself a life. I built myself a house. – Life as a House

As a metaphor I’ve wondered if this isn’t something we subconsciously  do. Through the years I’ve notice that most of the people I know doing renovations would end up leaving something undone, something that would always bother them, that they would get to… Then when they finally addressed it they ended up selling a  few months latter. I’m not sure if that says anything about human nature or not.

I think that when we grieve such a change after putting so much work in it we are also grieving a imagined future that can not be. All the work you put in for this imagined future feels like regret but nothing we do or learn is lost even if we must move on.

A part of you seems to be aware that the renovation wasn’t just about  bringing the house back to life. If this house was interpreted as if it were a dream… What associations come to mind when you think of House? What feelings do you connect to when you look at your work you completed? Which room ‘talks’ to you the most? How are you like this House? It might be worth while to examine it.

As for regret…

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living.
Easy to wish we’d developed other other talents, said yes to different offers.
Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have.
It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be.
It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

A ‘house’ it seems is always a work in progress.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Peter.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Peter.