Thoughts on Home ownership vs. Karma

As we go down this path of selling our current home and buying a new one I reminisce about what it was like when we bought our first home together, the one we currently live in.

When we were house hunting we found a few homes, 3 to be exact, that we wanted. We lost one in a closed bidding war, got the one we're in and chose not to bid on one of them. Life is strange at times.

The house we live in now came our way due to someone else's misfortune. The couple who bought it split up just months after buying it and were divorced shortly after. The house was part of the settlement. I often wondered if it would be bad karma to buy a house that had that history. I can tell you that the first 2 years of our marriage were tough ones. Adapting for the first time in a long term relationship can be hard. We weathered those early years and in the process (5 years later, nearly to the day) found ourselves much stronger than we were before, both as individuals and as a couple. We became a united front through all we weathered, from family, from friends, from us just adapting. You grow together or you grow apart, you have only 2 choices to make. We weathered the storm by growing together, each in our own way.

The other house, the one we never bid on was an incredible home too. Better than the house we got and in a better neighborhood but it's karma was 'scary' to me. We met the home owners when we toured. I made the mistake (I say that as I will never ask it to a home owner again) of asking the wife why they were leaving. Her answer was brutally honest and she never shed a single tear, I know she is a stronger person than I am when talking about the subject she talked about. She said they had a dream, of getting out of the city, out of the loft and moving to the suburbs. They wanted a good home with a yard and neighbors, etc to raise their children in. They spent several years trying to have that family and never did conceive one. They gave up and decided it was too painful to bear anymore, too hard to see all those families with children around them. They couldn't take it, put their house on the market and moved back to the city to another loft. They let that door close and walked through another one into another life I guess.

I can never forget that couple, their dream, etc. Maybe it's because E and I had that dream and failed too. Maybe it's because the irony of not choosing that house for fear of the karma is not lost on me. (If we'd chosen that house, would we instead have a child yet be divorced?) We had just 6-8 more months to go after we passed up on that house till we found out that we were in the same boat as them. Walking around, seeing couples with children, having neighbors excited to meet us until they find out we don't have kids and seeing them wish us well and never talking to us again. I'll never ever forget that couple, that house, their dream and how ironic life is. We steered clear of that house for fear of bad karma... And yet karma didn't matter, our life was already getting ready to detour from our dreams. I'll never forget how at the moment she told us why they were moving that this indescribable lump formed in my throat, that I felt intense sorrow and sadness, that my heart ached for her... Maybe though that was me aching for us and what the next 5 years held for us and I didn't even know it.

I wonder what karma, good or bad, our next home holds for us. I wonder. I also wonder how that couple is doing, what journey life has taken them on during these last five years. I hope, I really really hope, they found a way to their dream after all. As we've discovered, there is NOT just one path to go down to reach your dream, sometimes you have to possess the courage and determination to take the path less traveled...