Life is a Mirror

This past week, my solar hot water heater broke, flooding four rooms in my home.

Catastrophe or blessing?

One of the qualities about the house that I love is that care has been taken to make it quite sustainable. The solar hot water system was one of the qualities of which I was most proud. However, the estimate to replace it isn’t a good choice for us at this time for several reasons. For now, we will be installing a regular electric water heater, but in the future, as technology improves, I may actually install several solar options.

The four rooms were already badly in need of reorganization and renovation. They were the only rooms in the house that I hadn’t renovated when I first bought the house, and they were a constant reminder that I still had something to deal with. But it was very easy for me to pretend they didn’t exist, as we mostly used the rooms only for storage and it was my intention to turn two of the rooms into a garage “someday.”

Some very valuable items were stored in those rooms. My partner’s grandfather was a collector of antiques and several inherited pieces were damaged in the flood. There were also a number of books – some of them older and quite valuable, and some of them more sentimental in value. Some of the damaged items included original artwork done by my partner, and notebooks full of research information. Those are the heartbreakers. There can be no real value put on those items, and the loss of them weighs heavily.

Home insurance covers loss due to flooding such as this, so we have had adjusters, disaster recovery teams, and restoration and storage crews swarming our home. It’s been quite a week! In addition, we were without hot water over the weekend, so we stayed in a nearby hotel and ate most of our meals in restaurants. Luckily, insurance covers reasonable costs due to being without hot water. We made it into an unexpected getaway adventure and enjoyed our time together in a new setting.

We will, of course, be reimbursed for many of our losses, and insurance will be bringing in a crew to fix the damaged floors and walls. And we are now forced to sort through and organize everything when it is returned from dry storage, rather than putting it off for “someday.”

I could look at this as a stressful time and get caught up in the unfairness of it all, or I can see all of the benefits derived from this experience – most especially a situation that is leading me more rapidly to fulfilling my intentions for that space.

To add an interesting facet to the whole situation, lately I have been doing some very significant and deep work on taking my life to the next level. I have been aligning myself more clearly with my highest values and committing to expanding my consciousness as well as my circle of influence so that I can live out my purpose for being on this planet more fully. I am so very excited about the work I am doing and where I am going. I feel as though I have cleaned up years of emotional clutter and limiting beliefs in one fell swoop as I charge forward into the bright future ahead of me.

Hm. Could there possibly be a metaphor here?