rules, consequences, concrete and zen

My brother talks about a rule of threes. Usually he's talking about things like renovations, where whatever you are doing will take three times as long, or cost three times as much, or both. This is a good rule to keep in mind.

I think maybe the rule of threes is working in my own life. I had an uproar around here when I decided to sell my apartment. Then when sales suddenly fell off, I took it off the market, and took a good look at my own personal life, to see why I wanted to move so much. Then I initiated a second uproar, by asking my partner to move out. This of course solved one problem I was having but opened up several others. (This isn't an indicator of the rule of threes, but of the law of unintended consequences. In this case, some emotional fallout, among other things.)

It may be true that this wasn't the best time to decide, given my state of mind, but what the heck. Now that I was staying put in my recently more spacious apartment, I decided it was time to change the bathtub. It may just be that I have some kind of mental illness that shows itself in renovation-type behaviours. I'm not sure. But the bathtub in this place was okay, if I moved. But staying, it finally wore me down. It is (or was) 30 years old, and a jacuzzi at that. Whenever I ran the jets, to clean them out, strange black things floated out. I wasted a phenomenal amount of water refilling the tub, and running it again, to get the pipes clean. Alas, it seemed futile. I did still use the tub, but couldn't help thinking about the used bathwater always sitting in those pipes. Yuk.

Anyway, this week my friendly renovator came to take out the old tub. It turns out that, while the uproars came in threes, there is also the rule of three within each event. When this building was built, for some reason, the builders decided to pour their leftover concrete around my tub, after it was installed. This meant that the old tub had to be chopped up to get it out. Then the concrete had to be broken up in order to haul it out, so that some kind of level floor can be created in the space where the new bathtub will go. What a production, you say. Noisy too. (This is only two things, so there's got to be one more glitch coming, but maybe the fact that the 'trim' (what we laypeople call taps) won't arrive until about a month after the tub is installed will suffice.

Anyway, yesterday I was kicked out of the house so as to not breathe in fibreglass as the old tub was ceremoniously dismembered. Today, for the concrete, I kicked myself out. I went for a hike up the Grind with the aforementioned brother. I know, it was raining, but sometimes you just have to go. We had a perfectly fine hike, talking all the way.

In the last quarter the rain turned to snow. We both kept very careful attention on the moment, indeed on where our feet were at each moment (what he calls zen-grinding) but every now and then I stopped so I could look around. I did not have my camera, so I can't show you, but it was profoundly beautiful up there. Believe me. Fresh snow in the forest. And so quiet. Not a single sound of pulverizing concrete. And then my brother spotted two deer stepping through the trees. A doe and half-grown fawn. Their colouring was perfect. They were the same colour as the trees, and their white bellies matched the snow. Light and dark, shadow and snow. This, I guess, was a rule of two. Definitely some kind of zen.