Decisions, decisions...

The saga of my search for accommodation has led me to ponder (as so much in this world seems to do...).

I've been working hard, investing bucketloads of emotional energy in an attempt to find a place to buy, and it now seems that the house I had been going to buy is not going to happen. The survey was a stinker, and I just don't think I want to take the risk. So I'm faced with two options: to search for another purchase; or to search for a place to rent. I've settled (I think) on the latter, since I just don't have enough emotional energy left to start from scratch, or, for that matter, much time, because term will start again before I know it.

Olga agrees heartily - full of sensible advice, she is. Posh, however, has made her feelings quite clear (as she is wont to do...), that buying would be far preferable. And their different responses has intrigued me. I was oscillating last night, and Olga also made very clear her thoughts, that renting for a while would give me the breathing space I need to make a proper decision, and that it would be perfectly reasonable to rent for a significant period of time. But, at the same time, she understood very well all my reasons for preferring to buy. Posh, on the other hand, did what she does best, which is to make me feel like my decision was wrong, almost entirely on the basis that it was different from what she would do.

How does she do that? She says all the right things - "It's up to you"; "It's not what I would do, but you have to make the decision"; "It's not up to me but...". These are all the same sort of things Olga would say. And yet Posh makes me feel like I'm just wrong. Maybe it's the tone of voice...maybe it's just my story...Can we ever honestly say that we know what someone else thinks, or intends us to think, or to what extent do we import our own baggage into the whole scenario? If there's something in Posh's voice, what makes me think that means anything? For sure, that age-old ideology that voice and meaning are entwined, that irrepressible notion that we can tell something about the speaker from the speech.

Posh subscribes to that ideology: her troubled relationship with her mother is based largely on "the way she [her mother] says things"; Posh "can just tell", she says, what her mother's subtext is when she says things. I like to think that I don't buy it, that our interpretation of what people say is always intensely filtered through our own stories about people and the world. And yet when Posh says these things to me about the buying/renting question, it feels very clear to me that she means to indicate my wrong-ness, even if she doesn't intend for me to understand that. Very complicated.

Can we scrub out the stories? How are those stories formed? All I can suggest is why they are formed, which goes back to an earlier blog point I made, when I suggested that we are all always so desperate to fix meaning. We want so desperately to understand, to know, and not to have meaning left hanging. And that is surely why we import our stories, because they allow a fixity that we could otherwise not achieve.

As for whether we can scrub them out...who knows? But the realisation that they are there and informing my feelings about people and the world takes me at least one step closer to being able to choose whether or not I accept them and their influence.