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We dream about moving to a larger property.  We’d like to move somewhere with enough acreage to house some livestock, with 10 or more acres.  We would love to build our own natural home or earth ship.  We would love to live off the grid.  The dream world looks so beautiful.  But when my bleary dreaming eyes begin to refocus, I see that we would have so much property to manage, many animals to care for, a home to retrofit (at the very least) or build at best.  All while Rob is working full time outside of the home, and I am very busy with three little ones.  This doesn’t even account for the extra monthly expenses, as acreage comes with a hefty price tag, both in the property value, but also in upkeep.

We have flopped back and forth on the issue so many times.  What should we do?  When should we move?  What about our current place?  We’ve already got something great, and we’re living in it!  Our house is awesome.  We’ve done a lot of work to make it lighter on the planet.  We have half an acre of property and the ability to keep chickens.  This fall, Rob planted the last tree to complete our forest garden guilds.  We have only had two of our trees produce fruit so far.  There is so much potential here that we’d be walking away from.  There are also all of the memories housed in these walls.  All three of my babies were born upstairs.  Emotionally I don’t know if I’m ready to leave.

But part of me wants to just jump!  Sometimes I feel like we’d be better off if we just did it.  Humans are wonderful at rising to a challenge.  I’m curious to see how quickly we could make our own safety nets.  But the realities of living with three little ones allow my practical side to step in, convincing me to wait with thoughts like, ‘How could we possibly build our own home?  I can’t even seem to get the laundry folded and put away!’

I enjoy looking at real estate online.  Somehow looking at properties makes me feel like I’m making change.  As my husband put it last night, it seems easier to sit on the computer looking at real estate and dreaming of how our lives could be than embracing the one we have.   Looking for a new property is shopping on a grander scale.  Voyeuristically looking at the lives of others through their homes pictured online is not helping anything.  On some level, I have the hope that I’ll find a new life for us which is somehow better than the one we’ve got here.  The truth is, I won’t.  I know this.  I know that happiness is created not bought.  So why do I keep doing this to myself?

In the end, I think it’s my impatience that is the problem; I’m wanting the progressions to have already been made, so that we could be in the position to make our leap successful.  I fear nothing more than making the leap then learning we were ill prepared, and ending up failing at our own dream.  Impatience and the ‘want it now’ mentality is so ever present in our society, especially at this time of year.  I find myself with yet another deep dredge of consumerist thought that I’m frustrated still exists in me.

So what we’ve decided is that we need to do the work to get ourselves ready to jump before we actually do.  We don’t want to end up with more debt and less time; this is the antithesis of our goal!  We have been working so hard to create space in our lives, not take it away.  So for us, it’s better to err on the side of caution, allowing ourselves the time and space to work out the details in advance.  In the meantime, I’m going to stay off of the realtor website and instead work on refining our holistic goal.  Our hope is to live in line with the intentions of our holistic goal, and wait for the universe to shape this into our reality.