And the walls came tumbling down...

For the past few days I have been considering my relationship to things.  Not people, but things, things like my house, my clothes, my physical body, my car and the mechanics of all of these.

This new area  for examination comes from coming back from Holland and seeing the cracks in the upstairs wall of my house.  I felt physically ill when I saw the cracks.  I mentioned before that it felt like my house cancer had returned.  I thought it was cured, but it was only in remission, waiting to return when my guard was down.  I see that this is an over the top reaction and more importantly,  I may give this power to make me ill if I carry on in this way. I am so identified with my home that I see any attack on it, whether from intruders (like those we had in the middle of the night last year) or from subsidence or even moths, as a personal attack on my safety and security.

I know that a lot of these feelings of fear and lack of safety and security are a genetic ancestral inheritance.  My parents had good reason to worry about their safety and whether where they were was actually safe.  It often wasn't, but I am not them.  My life experiences are not theirs.  I know this, I intellectually accept this, I understand and can analyse this with my rational mind, but when I see the cracks appearing in the walls and the ceiling of my house I feel like Chicken Little, the character in the children's book, yelling 'the sky is falling, the sky is falling...' just because a small acorn fell on his head.  The rational mind takes a vacation sometimes and my completely crazed mind takes over.

It is defintely not a good thing to refer to inanimate objects as if they are part of me.  I am not the cracked house.  I am not suffering from subsidence and though I do sometimes feel I have settled myself on the sofa for the duration, I do not have cracking caused by movement. Most importantly in this, I do not have cancer.  The house does not have cancer.  There is no tumour in any area of my life and to see it this way is not only a bit whacko, it's also dangerous to me.  I need to be careful how I identify with things.  Or I need to change my focus and identify with the 99% of my home that is in great condition and beautiful.

Today my friendly builder arrived to help me sort out my front door.  The door has dropped, or the frame has moved or both,  The door has also swelled in the warm weather and warped - a bit like me.  The result of these tiny movements is that I can no longer open or shut my front door.  This means that in order to get out I have to pull the door with all my might and in order to get back in I have to shove the door with my shoulder or better yet, kick it.  Now, not only are the walls falling down, which is definetely a metaphor for my life falling apart, but I am trapped in this crumbling edifice unable to easily get out or let anyone in.  How apt!

To top it all  off, my tooth fractured and broke today.  An expensively crowned important molar now needs major demolition and then re-construction work - 5 hours of work!  This, I was just told, will cost almost £1500 and I am horrified.  I feel that it is all part of the tenuous nature of my physical world right now.  No wonder I'm finding it hard to lose weight, I need to reinforce my structure in case of another collapse!

It is true that I am a nest builder.  I like my security and I love having an environment that cuddles me and takes care of me.  Just like the people I surround myself with, I see that in order to have a reliable environment to take care of me, I need to devote some time and energy to take care of it.  It's called maintenance and unlike my self-cleaning oven and self-defrosting fridge,  I do need to put energy into my relationships, regardless of whether they are flesh and blood or bricks and mortar.

Just don't get me started on my war against the cashmere/carpet eating moths. They cannot survive.