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Living on the Edge, or Better is Better

We've been living on the edge for 10 months now.  Ten months ago today was when we looked at our lives and said, okay, let's do this thing.  The day before, John had gotten laid off from the corporate thing, and we knew we had to make some big decisions.  Why not add career and location into the mix, if we were talking about big decisions anyway?  Right?

So we did and we put all our eggs into a basket and shook the basket.  (Note: don't shake real baskets of eggs.)

Would the Centreville house sell well?  Heaven only knew.  When we bought it, the market was in a nasty spiral.  I paced around, imagining foreclosures and worse.  It sold well.

Could we handle the uncertainties of the new property?  Could we find a place to stay while we sussed it out?  Yes, and yes, with the help of a tremendously supportive network of friends and family.

What about the runway?  The runway was the length of time that we had to get situated to get our creative empire off the ground.  We thought at first that the runway was a few weeks.  We're still on it (although it is looming precariously over us now).  (It is a metaphorical runway, the kind that you can take off from and the kind that hangs over your head like the sword of damocles.)

So the cabin itself will be livable before deep freeze.  We can, at worst, seal off the upstairs and live downstairs.  It's not ideal, but we don't care about ideal.  This has been an adventure in putting perfectionism and expectations into their proper place.  Their proper place is in planning and dreaming. Living is where we say "better is better" and we paint the plywood floors and worry about hardwood floors when we are on the creative career path.  You know?

We are succeeding.  A couple of days like we've had, where we have gotten a little battered and some of the plans have had to drop off, we have to remind ourselves that this is part of living on the edge, and it's the thing we chose.  It's not a hard life at all!  It's actually a fabulous adventure.

Have you WATCHED adventure movies?  There are a lot of bandages.  But they're about heroes, heroes of their own lives.  "Never give up, never surrender."

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