When the Ground Shifts

Staying still in the off-centre times

I don’t usually arrive in your inbox two days in a row but I felt compelled to write this as writing here helps me to process and understand things. Your comments always help me too. Thank you for listening. I hope in sharing this, if anyone is going through anything similar it may help you too. 💙

Photo by Kristina V on Unsplash

Just when you think you've found some clarity, everything changes again. Last week, someone who had a profound impact on both me and my husband — especially to him — died suddenly. His unexpected passing brought with it not only deep sadness but also days of soul-searching.

Soon after learning of his death,

Andō

’s post ‘Finding home here and now’ landed in our inboxes. It was as if it had been written specifically for us as we once again have housing woes so are contemplating packing up to go travelling. Again.

My husband gently pointed out that we seem stuck in a cycle: when things get hard in the UK, we go backpacking. Almost always to Asia. At first, the excitement of travel lifts us — but after a few months, the magic fades. We get too hot, too tired, too world-weary. And always, we want to come back. We want to find a home.

He’s right.

For years, we’ve dreamed of living in the Scottish Highlands — and right now, here we are. It’s not a permanent setup, but we could try to find one. And yet, it’s me that stops us. I’ve had to face up to something hard: I’m scared. Not just of getting back into the rental market or of furnishing a house. I’m scared that doing so will make me feel trapped, weighed down again.

I also have a problem with authority — a personality trait that’s been with me all my life. The way letting agents and landlords behave gets my back up immediately. In trying to understand why I feel like this, I came across this article from Psychology Today that offered some insight. It said:

“So, if our parents had very big, scary personas, who demonstrated their power through threats, verbal, emotional, or physical abuse, we seem to expect some kind of similar treatment from other authorities.”

My parents did all of those things. Over and over again until I was into my early twenties and finally stood up to them. And although letting agents obviously don’t do this, they wield some sort of power over me.

A bit later in the article it goes on to say:

“The biggest problem with all of this is that it assumes that the only real authorities are those outside of us. It does not allow room for the fact—central to our mental health—that we are the final authority over our lives. Whether we handle that authority well or not, nevertheless, we are the final authority.”

That hit hard. The freedom I’ve been chasing all this time — through movement, through escape, through living in different ways — is already inside me. Like happiness, it doesn’t depend on external circumstances. It lives in the story I’m telling myself about them.

As someone who’s always writing about the power of the stories we tell to create our reality, you’d think I would be telling myself the right ones. But I’m fallible. I’m human. Finding my way as best I can in a world that I don’t fit into very well. At the moment, I feel lost, confused and sad. But I know that this too will pass.

But even though I have now recognised this pattern we’re stuck in and realise that travelling probably isn’t the answer, it might be the only viable one as finding a home isn’t easy. There’s no point in kidding ourselves that we can live anywhere just to have a home. We want to stay in Scotland — or maybe the far north of England, or even return to Ireland. But the housing options are few and far between.

Then there’s the additional issue of who we are. As self-employed people who’ve lived outside the mainstream for well over a decade — no credit cards, no debt, no credit history, no landlord references — we don’t tick the boxes letting agencies require. We won’t even get past the initial application stage let alone get to actually view a house. So we have to find private rentals directly through owners. And those are rare.

So what to do?

I have no answers.

I’ve been re-reading Pema Chödrön’s “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times” and as always, it provides comfort.

“Fear is a universal experience. Even the smallest insect feels it. We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.”

Although I am afraid of no longer living like we have been for so long, and I do have somewhere to escape to as I could just book that plane ticket and pack that bag, I haven’t done it. As the day we have to leave this temporary home approaches — with nowhere lined up — I’m staying right where we are. Learning, as Pema says, from it.

“Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.”

I’m definitely in an off-centre, in-between state and I’m trying to keep my heart and mind as open as they’ve ever been to allow new opportunities to flood in.

May they arrive soon.

How are things with you?

With love,

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