Letting Go is a Risk

When you don’t know next steps, it just feels like you will have… less. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. Maybe it’s the door opening.

Letting go is good, it is what I teach. But in many cases it is scary! I get it. This week we finally declared, our ugly leaking, rusting 21’ round pool. DEAD. We have been avoiding this for 5 years and just band-aiding it each year and praying we wouldn’t bust it and flood the neighbours.

We got this pool with the house 13 years ago, and it was a sight then. However it takes up half the yard and since we were expecting our kiddo, it felt like we should keep it and enjoy it. And we did enjoy it for many seasons, and even rebuilt it once due to the “deep end” it had developed. But I tell you each year it was a marriage test, opening it. It was not set up well for maintenance, and I think we just did things the hard way sometimes. We made the best of it and then we hung on to it because it was what we knew.

The decision to do this in midst of the current lockdowns/stay-at-home orders is not an easy one. It helped it had developed a leak one-third of the way up, the deck wood so deteriorated and wood prices are through the roof. But even with all that, as my husband and I started the drain process, we were still waffling, big time.

The backyard has never felt like ours. It is huge but it was filled with fruit trees when we moved in, planted in very odd spots, the pool and deck also in odd spots not optimally functional. I have dreamed of a different yard, but that is where it has stayed… a dream. Over the years some trees died, some we cut down and one came down in a storm. This pool and deck is the last remaining (exterior) design of owners past that needs to go.

This letting go is a risk. Will we regret not having a pool this summer, such as it was. How long will we live with the mud pit and sand circle? Will we really get to have a nice yard one day? I do not have the answers to these questions… my fears… today. I just know that in this case the LETTING GO has to happen first, and the rest of the steps will come later.

Stay tuned.

~Diane