21 Jan 2016
Words Mike O'Connor

A Year of Joy and Light Beckons

There are few things that focus the mind more than the realisation that exactly 12 months ago, you promised yourself that this year, things would be different.

What happened? You looked away for a moment and 2015 had disappeared, all gone in a flash, and you were going to do so much.

It’s too late to worry about this year so let us look to 2016, which will be filled with joy and the lightness of being because by then, we will have sold our house.

If, by some stoke of misfortune, we have not then it will not be filled with joy and light because I will be lying in a dark room, heavily sedated.

Some people say that selling a house is the most stressful thing you can do. Really? Could that be because every time the phone rings, you think it’s the agent with the happy news that they have found a buyer?

Instead, it’s the agent asking if it would be fine to bring around a potential buyer in two hours’ time.

You agree because this person might be The One and so you spend two frantic hours turning the house into a spotless, gleaming display home.

It only takes two hours because the previous Saturday you rose before dawn and cleaned the house, mowed the lawn and cleaned the pool in preparation for the weekly open house inspection by more potential buyers.

In this you are helped by your wife who can spot a speck of dust at 100 metres and who marches around the house yelling: ‘Stop putting marks on the fridge!’ and ‘get your filthy greasy hands off the pantry door!’

You have been doing this now for two months and your grip on sanity is loosening by the day.

With the house sold, we’ll start our new 2016 life in an inner city apartment.

This is in the process of being built. Occasionally, we look at each other and wonder at the power of the marketing spin which convinces you to forsake a large, comfortable home in the suburbs and pay a large pile of money for a highrise apartment that exists only in your mind.

‘We’ll be fine. You just have to adjust,’ I tell my wife who has never lived in an apartment before. I haven’t bothered to tell her about my own apartment experiences such as the time I discovered the tenant who lived down the corridor from me kept a massive boa constrictor as a pet.

I saw it one day through a partially opened door, coiled on his sofa, which explained the trail of chicken feathers I would occasionally see in the corridor.

Terrified of snakes, I lived in mortal fear it would find its way into my apartment and crush me to death in my bed.

Then there was the neighbour, a woman, whose loud moaning would wake me at precisely 6 o’clock each morning, weekends included, a cacophony which would continue for half an hour. She may have been singing in the shower but I don’t think so.

Then there was the time that I stepped out of the lift, key in hand to open the door to my apartment which was not five metres distant. At the precise moment I stepped out of the lift, I dropped the keys and they fell through that incredibly small opening between the lift and the edge of the lift well.

You couldn’t do it if you tried but I managed it. You probably think it’s quite expensive to get the lift company to send someone out to climb down into the lift shaft and retrieve your keys and you’d be right.

None of these things will occur, of course, when we move into our apartment which as yet does not exist because life will overflow with joy and light.

Optimism is a wonderful thing and if, in 2016, my reserves of this precious commodity should dwindle I will look to my mother.

She’s 88, lives alone, and has just had the old family home renovated and painted.

When she told my brother and I that she was going to do this, we looked at each other and both thought the same thought. ‘How long does Mum think she’s going to live?’ said my brother when we were alone. ‘Quite a while yet, I’m guessing,’ I said.

The year ahead beckons, its glow all but visible on the horizon. As Winston Churchill once said: ‘For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use to be anything else."