🏡 Dream House Update

House-buying hell, gleaned wisdom & our big news

Jul 19, 2024

If you’ve been following our house-buying ‘adventures’ and want to know what happened, do feel free to skip to the little row of houses at the bottom!

I’ve had a strange guillotine hanging over me for eleven days. It could fall at any moment - either violently slicing my dream house away from me, or wedding me to it forever.

We first saw it last Monday. It was on a road I’d never been down before, just seven minutes drive from the temple. The rooms were light and spacious and there was a bath and space for two therapy offices for me and Kaspa. All around it was green green green.

I knew then that it wasn’t perfect. It has a hot water boiler in the bedroom, two very narrow rooms from a squeezed-in extension, and only a small-to-medium-sized garden that backs onto a golf course. What does perfection matter when there is sparkling fairy dust in the air? By the time we walked back out into the sunshine, we’d both fallen in love.

We put in our offer and waited. On Friday we heard that ours was the only viable offer and that there was just one more viewing the following Monday. On Tuesday we found out there were more viewings on Wednesday. Yesterday we heard the words I’d been dreading: ‘best and final’. Two others offers had materialised and we were all invited to gamble our life savings away by picking a figure out of the ether and emailing it to the estate agent.

How much did the others want it? Would they put in more than the asking price? Were they in a better position than we are to buy? How much was it worth? Would similar houses come up? HOW MUCH DID WE WANT IT?

Over the past few months I’ve been under similar guillotines. Our first loved house went to best and final and we lost. There was so much competition for our second, we decided not to enter the fray (it actually went for 20K above asking). There have been other instruments of torture too - I won’t go into the boring details - but they have all had one thing in common.

My powerlessness.

As I type the word, a stifled sob rises up from deep inside me. I have worked so hard in my life to avoid feeling powerless. I have become an expert at self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. I have carefully arranged my working and spiritual life so I have little or no responsibility to anyone other than myself. I show my vulnerability only to a very trusted few - Kaspa, a handful of friends.

Over the past few months, other people have had power over me. I haven’t been able to influence or charm or manipulate my way out of it. The (complicated) buyer of our (complicated) house. The estate agents and the house sellers. Our mortgage advisor, crunching our figures and telling us what is or isn’t possible.

With slap after painful slap, this process has shown me how privileged I am in not having being under the power of others more often. I’ve been watching myself - a worm squirming on a hook - my people-pleasing parts working overtime, bubbles of fury and despair rising up and bursting, a depression that has settled over everything like a grey film and that leaves me less likely to do anything.

I feel a little silly sharing all this. I know that I’m hugely lucky to be in a position to buy ANY house. I know that some of the size of my tangles (all of it?) is because of my own personal history - my limits and fallibilities and desires and fears.

And. It is what it is. It has been an incredibly stressful process, and it has thrown all sorts of spanners in my works (what a great image!). It may be over very soon, and if we don’t get this house we’ll be back to the very beginning again. There will be more dizzying loops and turns of the emotional roller-coaster ahead.

Seeing all this more clearly - what’s inside me, what’s so difficult about being at other’s mercy, how I’m reacting and why - has helped an awful lot. Clocking it, getting it, and forgiving myself.

What else has helped?

What has helped is remembering - when I have been able - that I can lean into this impermanence, even at its most frightening and destabilising and unknown. I can lean right into this impermanence and trust that this period of our life will pass.

What has helped is trusting that this year is showing me lessons that I couldn’t have learnt any other way - time and gentleness will unpack their wisdom for me.

What has helped is tasting the dual experience of both the guillotine AND the huge scarlet poppies outside my office window, a few comforting words from a friend, a bowl of good ice-cream, Ralph’s ‘soft face’ which he wears when he’s everso relaxed.

What has helped is gaining a deeper understanding of how it is to be powerless - even from within my white middle-class privileged frame - so hopefully my heart can respond with a little more empathy to the ongoing powerlessness of so many of my dear fellow humans.

What has helped is your kind words, here on the comments, on Notes, in other places.

What has helped is knowing that my beloved house, with green all around it, will go on to make somebody happy.

Go gently,
Satya <3

Tell me: What difficult things are showing up in your life right now? What is helping you? What are your experiences of powerlessness? Also, do feel free to tell me your happy-ending buying-a-house stories 😉

🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡

SO DID WE GET THE HOUSE????????

I wrote this piece yesterday. Today, Friday, an hour ago, we had the call…. The estate agent started by asking me how I was. I said ‘I don’t know??’ feebly and held my breath…

WE GOT IT!!!!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

This was despite the seller having two other offers and one of them in cash - apparently she liked that we were Buddhists and ‘had a feeling’…. hurray for her feeling and hurray for all our friends and all of you and everyone else who had our back. I can’t quite believe it!

Obviously it’s not over until it’s over, but I am going to make the most of the relief trickling through my body, dissolving the stress of the past couple of weeks. The past few months of hunting and putting in offers and ups and downs. As the stress leaves it’s making space for I WANT TO DANCE AROUND THE ROOM ENERGY. Dance with me! 💃🏻🕺🏻

It turns out that the person my house-with-green-around is going to make happy is ME! And Kaspa. And the dogs. And I’m hoping that I will fill up with happiness there, and pour it into my writing and send it to you, and pass it on to my therapy clients, and take it to the temple.

Hurray for houses. Hurray for happy endings!

🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡

Coming Up Next

A series of wisdom gems about my favourite way-of-seeing-the-world, Internal Family Systems. The first will be free & those after are for my amazing paid subscribers (let me know if you want to join them but can’t afford it at the moment).

Things from the week

🌞 Reading fragments of My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman - a poet who was diagnosed with an unpredictable untreatable cancer (although many years later he’s currently in remission) which throws him into an encounter with/conversation with/new reliance on the Infinite.

🌞 Consistently eating too much sugar, which I think is entirely understandable and appropriate in the circumstances (well, parts of me do anyway)

🌞 Delighting in the AMAZING view across the valley from the temple where we currently live, as it’s sometimes easier to really appreciate things when you know they won’t last forever (and of course this applies to everything).

🌞 Enjoying early mornings with Ralph-dog on my lap so we can gaze a little adoringly into each other’s eyes.

A sprinkling of wisdom

I experience great suffering when I forget my impermanence. My teachers have taught me to love myself, and that has caused me to love beings in the world. There is no greater work than the work of self-love because it lies at the heart of our liberation from ignorance. I show up because I love.
~ Lama Rod Owens