Most of us most of the time, and all of us some of the time, live in houses that remind us of the many ways in which life has turned out to be not quite what we had in mind.
My unsettling suggestion is that perhaps this is a good thing.
Our houses, like our lives, will never be finished, never be settled. The only thing that will settle the affairs of this life is death itself. To be too settled in this life is, in Emerson's sense, to die while still living, to live a sort of death-in-life. Only so far as we are unsettled is there any hope for us. Let us remain unsettled, therefore, in order that we may truly live.
— Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall