I bought a couch today. In the morning the internet led me to someone who had just posted a couch not 8 hours ago, during the night. Four hours later I'd gotten a Uhaul, navigated to this stranger's home, gone into their basement and out again with a brand used couch.
The internet's uses are vast. It is power which is often abused, but at its core it's a megaclassifieds section. But this isn't really about the internet.
I bought a dresser today. Same story except for this one it fit in my car, a Mazda CX-5, with its seats down.
I've lived in my current spot for 3 years, but after a certain point you feel locked into the way that it is, or at least I do. Options and possibilities that ran plentiful when you first saw the place or first moved in shrivel up soundlessly in the corner. "Ooh, we could--" gets lost in the din of the everyday.
Forcibly critiquing my home every year seems like a great precedent to set. Like spring cleaning, but for furniture, for flow, for life's enjoyment - as much as you find in your home.
I got rid of my sectional. It was too big and the L portion is really a useless piece of seating. Everyone prefers a chair. Otherwise you feel like you're borrowing the space even though you should think the furniture would stake your claim. Things feel more open. I get to shop for a chair. More opportunities abound, and the chance to plan for them is now a reopened door.
There's something to settling, to comfort, that kills how your mind works - how it reaches out and tries to claim an unknown or empty space. As one of my favorite authors said, "Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral," which I always misremember as being just "Comfort is the death of passions." Your move, Mr. Gibran.
Not that being comfortable is bad in itself, but it's a condition that can call early victories and Good Enoughs that clamp down on the open breeze of the eternal What If.
And yet, isn't a nest the death of an adult's life, that a parent is born in its ashes? And aren't parents those who bring those living What Ifs into the world? But this comfort isn't necessarily peaceful - there's still the conflict that breeds the new, the opportunity. Perhaps there's a use for comfort, a treaty at arm's length to maintain a wary balance between inertia and the spinning drill of evolution.
I kept my other dresser. That's too much for me to worry about right now.