This adulting nonsense is so hard, sometimes! Most particularly the part where I find myself having to balance long-term and short-term needs, or just generally sort out wants from needs, develop new perspective on old situations, or balance the whimsical with the practical. So hard. Still, not learning and doing these things, while certainly among the many options available, seems to hold the greatest promise of huge disappointments later on. So, I practice, I learn, I grow – I continue to adult, with varying levels of skill.

The house-hunt is a case in point. I just haven’t been getting far looking at tiny fixers. Some of them have been quite cute. Several of them would definitely meet most of my needs for long-term housing, and would satisfy the shorter-term (more urgent-seeming) desire to move from the place I am in right now. Fucking hell – there’s more to it than swiping my card, regardless of whether or not I have pre-approval in hand. Irksome. There are criteria to be met with a VA loan. There is the ever-present reality of a “seller’s market” in an industry quite willing to refrain from the sort of economic regulation and clear process requirements that might cut into anyone’s ability to drive commissions higher (through higher prices generated by aggressive bidding among home-seekers, encouraged by realtors). Frustrating. I just want somewhere to call home. Coming to terms with one element of my dissatisfaction (specifically that I don’t actually want to live in a crowded residential suburb with an ugly commute) turns my attention to the beauties of rural living… and… the scarcity of land. Damn it. LOL I look at page after page of listings of parcels of land in my state… I’m sort of limited, though, to the region commutably close (by car) to my job, right? Yeah. So is everyone else, and most of the jobs in the state… right here in this area. Plenty of big lovely parcels of remote unimproved land out there, though… if I thought I could do a 10 or 12 hour commute I’d be in good shape. “Remote” has various magnitudes of meaning, but none of those mean “convenient to the office”. lol Well shit, at least I am still laughing.

For a moment this morning I wanted to sit down and write “Dear Universe, please send land I can afford, I’ll manage the rest. I’ve been very good this year” and hope for the best. 🙂 Sometimes there is a lot of gentle relief in having a child-like heart in these matters. Adulting mostly generally just sucks. lol

I sip my coffee and smile to myself. It’s not that bad, honestly. I’m house-hunting. That’s something pretty huge. It’s a time-consuming process, and well… that does take time. So, okay. I keep looking. I keep gathering resources. At some eventual future point there is a predictable logistical collision between available opportunities, resources, time, and decision-making, and then, shortly afterward… an outcome. I don’t even know what that outcome will be.

What if, and it’s not off the table, the thing that truly makes sense is to continue to work and save for retirement – the real brass ring in this game – and then utterly and wholly relocate (even out of the country)? Well… at that point, having a house would be no advantage at all. So. Yeah. Life is weird. I’m living one, this one, mine. I’ve no idea where this path leads, really. I think I know what I want… but I’ve inched along on this journey of self-understanding just enough to suspect that any notion I have of knowing what I want is, itself, a bit of an illusion. What is enough? (Honestly, that one is a frustrating bit for me; my idea of “enough” and the VA’s idea of “enough to loan me money for” are rather different… because… I’d live in a fucking yurt in the high desert well away from everyone, or out in the trees in a tent, or… yeah. I’m not actually all that fancy, as fancy human primates go.)

So, what can I do on a Tuesday to get a little farther to goal? Study, I suppose. Do my homework as a consumer. Be well-informed about what I am getting myself into. Be ready “when the time comes” … for whatever the outcome may be. Am I “there yet”? Nah, there’s a lot more to know than I ever will. It’s quite possible, at any point in life, to be more prepared than I am. There are verbs involved.

I sip my coffee. I think about life’s menu. I think over all of the many options – and these are only the ones I even know about, myself. I think about simple. I think about fancy. I think about enough. With one last swallow of now-cold coffee, I think about journeys, and progress, and beginnings, and verbs.

I head to my meditation cushion to begin again. 🙂