You are in a hurry to do something important. You juggle several different tasks while threading through traffic. Too late, you realize you have misjudged the situation, and you slam on the br-
Screeeech-BAM
- too late.
Is anyone else familiar with that awful sense that you just did something that is not you? Does anyone else know that intense desire to turn the clock back to the moment of decision — or indecision — when it would have been so easy to make the wiser choice, so easy to avert disaster?
I have had that feeling before, just after a certain traffic accident I caused.
I have that feeling now, but an order of magnitude worse: just today, it fully sank into me that I have built the wrong house.
Pacing outside Thai Basil in Fullerton, talking with Kathryn about it on my cellphone, I realized that this house is not the house we intended at the beginning. Not at all. How have we gone so wrong?
I have a theory that may explain it: “The Tyranny of Clarity.”
We knew pretty much what sort of house we wanted in the beginning. But we weren’t absolutely clear. But my dad was. He was clear about how important it was to hire an architect to design the place for us. So we did. His clarity trumped our ignorance.
We had a general idea of how we wanted the house to look: Craftsman, with some Spanish Mission flavor to it, and we’d decorate Norwegian/Guatemalan/Asian/African-ish (the decor we had done before). But Bob Sawyer had a clearer vision and a draftsman’s deft pen. We corrected his designs several times, making it less fancy, more practical, less Modern, more Craftsman and Asian… but we began with his design, not ours. His clarity trumped our generality.
We thought we knew how big we wanted our house: spacious but not ostentatious, just for the six of us plus room for a visiting family. But my dad knew building. He could see clearly that our “little” house on this narrow lot simply would not do. He convinced us to omit the driveway and expand the house width to the limits of our setbacks, with a minimum shrinkage front-to-back. His clarity trumped our humility.
We thought we had enough money to build this house without going into debt, judging from my father’s cryptically reassuring comments. …His clarity trumped our frugality.
We had a vague uneasiness about the mistakes that happened in the field: the accidental raising of the heights of each ceiling, the mistaken window placement in the block walls, the missing front apron on the second floor, plumbing done oddly, insulation forgotten in the loftroom walls, etc. Bob interpreted it all as serendipity or a welcome challenge, which would all come out for the best in the end. His clarity trumped our caution.
Clarity carried the day every time, consistently beating any vague sense of uneasiness. This is good when clarity is on the side of truth and love and faith. This is not good when the vague sense of uneasiness is the Spirit of God trying to steer us through deep waters we have not charted before.
Who knows best where the shoals doth lie
than the sailor who’s run aground?
We certainly have a clearer chart NOW of the waters we’ve sailed these past few years! May those who follow us (whether in homebuilding or moving into an urban neighborhood by choice) learn from our mistakes and avoid the pitfalls we have fallen into.
Be creative. Make your own unique mistakes. And as you do…
Beware the Tyranny of Clarity.
