Seeing What Can Be

 

My mom has pointed out that for purchasing a move-in ready house, we sure have done a lot of work on it.

I can't argue.

Mostly because I'm too tired from all the work we've done. {smirky smile}

Yesterday I set up office-camp at the kitchen table, my view into the living room obstructed by a line of potted plants and unplugged lamps while two guys hauled in heavy rolls of carpet and fitted them to our floors.

It's the last of the projects. For now. Ryan promises.

So while I sat at the table, toggling from tab to tab reading tweets and posts and pins, scribbling notes and taking breaks to underline meaningful words in this week's book, I thought about our beautiful move-in ready house that we have entirely overhauled so that it looks nothing like it did when we bought it.

We'll blame it partially on Ryan being a project junkie, but I think there's a deeper, truer reason behind all the changes.

When we walked into this house for the first time on January 28th, we walked in for fun. We weren't here to make a commitment. We weren't here to make memories, and my lack of photos documenting the day are proof of that. We were here to enjoy looking at a house, imagine ourselves in a space other than the one we'd always known together, and dream about a future day when something like this could be ours.

We had no idea that less than two months later, this very house WOULD be ours. The house, we declared when we saw it, was perfect. Wouldn't have to do a thing. Totally inhabitable just as it was. Nothing garish. Nothing broken.

But when we walked in on March 21, we saw the bare bones of potential. With all the things removed that made it the home of those who lived here before, we saw a canvas of a home.

We added and removed to better fit together as home and owners. We created a space that looked like us, and that took work. And along the way, we learned that some of the things that looked fine when dressed up for the ones who lived here before, actually needed some tender care before being redressed for our home.

So we did that, too. The carpet was one of those things. We hadn't planned to replace it. The carpet here before was not that old and a good brand that advertised resistance to staining. But in our every day, it didn't do that. No matter how much we cleaned or what we used, it showed dirt and resurrected old dirt. It tarnished the whole house, so we did more work to pull out everything we just moved in and have the carpet replaced with something fresh and decidedly more us.

It reminded me of how we see each other in this marriage we live every day. How we came together in good shape {well, I was not in literal good shape, but you get my point} and we loved each other for the people that we were and there really wasn't a need to change anything.


And then we married and we began to see how additions here and subtractions there and changes to this or that could make us fit better together as a couple. So we worked at it, changing and trying until we found what worked for us. And along that process, we uncovered things about ourselves we thought were okay until we realized they really weren't. And we didn't want them to tarnish the whole marriage, so we did the work to pull out everything that didn't work about those parts of life and replace it all with something to push us closer to being healthier, holier people.

We loved who we were, but we also saw the potential for more and we pushed toward that potential.

That's a healthy life, I think. The life that can see good in what is, but can see better in what can be.