Beyond the Breaking Point

If you’ve seen the movie, The Money Pit, you know our house when we bought it. We loved it, but we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

The first weekend, the well went dry. The house is in a beautiful setting, so we had paid what to us was a small fortune to plant fairly big trees, since we didn’t want to wait years for little ones to grow.

So there we were, 9 p.m. Saturday night, locating a plumber to check the well pump. Pump was fine. The well was too shallow for the drought we were in. Throughout the night, we watered trees, waited for the well to refill, then watered again. Then, of course, we had to have a new, deeper well drilled. I’ll spare you the details of the rest of the house, but suffice to say that though the bones were good, it was of an age that everything broke.

When we moved in, we thought Jed Clampett had nothing on us. We actually had a “cement pond.” After repairing what seemed like “everything” at the house, we had a first swim. My husband swam one length of the pool. Big smile. Then he went to climb out of the pool, only to have one of the rungs of the ladder give way. And on it went.

Now, 10 years later, the house has had a redo, and everything works. We’ve done numerous upgrades, and we love our pool, whether swimming in it or just looking at it in winter. We took this photo the other day after our snow.

I thought how life seems to have the same trajectory our house did. People often hit a breaking point someplace in their late 40s or 50s. The original stuff isn’t working consistently and we don’t yet have the resolve, insight, or resources to move past that. Being at the breaking point isn’t fun. In fact, it’s scary. But then, bit by bit, we get on top of it, learn to work with aging equipment, and the spring returns to our step. The trick is in learning that the breaking point is a chance to rewire, to get new glasses and see the world in a fresh, albeit, different way.

It’s at this stage many people rekindle a dream of having horses, or their emphasis with horses changes. It may be less about sport and more about enjoying nature or relationships. Or less about going faster and jumping higher, and more about quality of performance. The shift is invigorating, breathing new spirit into old passions. Life becomes exciting – beyond the breaking point.