As we continue to build out this year, I would like to draw upon our own experiences for both strength and inspiration. With that in mind, I’d like to share that my wife and I ALMOST bought a house this summer. We put in an offer, it was accepted, and we went through the inspections. We were weeks away from closing and moving everyone 2.5 miles down the road. And it was stressful.
We spent over 40 hours cleaning out and packing up our garage. We got rid of (donations and trash) 20 trash bags of stuff in the process. It was incredible. And something happened in the process: we realized that we truly loved our home and could do many of the things we were buying a house for within our current home.
Sure, we lost our inspection money. We caused ourselves a lot of unneeded stress. We made our kids cry a couple of times (both with happiness for their new rooms and sadness for changing Schools, and then again for not changing schools when we told them we weren’t moving). But, I wouldn’t take the experience back.
Through it I learned that it is (sometimes) far better to fix/make the thing you have into the thing you want than to try and buy your way to a solution. I also found that this had deep resonance with our work in APS. Many times, we try to “buy” a new solution (or App, or resource, or idea) rather than doing the deep investment of time that we might need to make in order to get the most out of what we have.
It is my sincere hope that we ask ourselves how we might be able to fall in love with our own problems, our own spaces, and our own people enough to solve for them.
I hope this wasn’t too much of a tangent for you this morning. This experience has given me a refreshed perspective and energy for digging in to the work we have ahead. I hope retelling it has at least been interesting, if not empowering.
