Colm O'Regan: My wife wrote 'traces of pain' - instead of 'paint' - while selling our old headboard

Pic: Roger Kenny

Sometimes you have to just stop and think: isn’t life astounding? The infinite complexity, the multiplicity of things happening at the same time all of which can combine to influence you. 

It mightn’t be a butterfly’s wings flapping a thousand miles away. It could just be someone turning left instead of right, or realising they’d forgotten their keys and going back inside the house instead of clipping your wing mirror with their car. 

Or a cloud that changes its mind about raining. And that’s not counting all the myriad choices you could have made and the different outcomes. 

Are there thousands of versions of each one of us in parallel existences, each one pursuing wildly different paths through life? Are they happier? Are they more successful? Or less successful because of a bad thing that happened that that version of you didn’t avoid? Imagine if you could see them. Would you be jealous of them or pity them?

Chances are though, at some point in The Timeline, all the different versions of you converge to be doing the same thing: move furniture around your gaff while grunting and swearing.

It is a bit of anti-climax when you realise that your life, with all its hopes and dreams, will eventually be largely about moving things from one room to another. It usually follows the same pattern:

• Procrastination because it’s going to be a pain in the hoop. 
• Moving the big stuff and realising that this wasn’t as bad as you thought. 
• Being left with the small bitty annoying stuff that defies categorisation and you realise it is as bad as you thought. 
• Horse all that shite into A Box Of Stuff.

Moving things within a small house has an extra dimension. Actually, one less dimension. It’s like those sliding puzzles where you have to slide a flat tile around a board that has only one empty space into which you can move. And so you can only move one step at a time. 

Begin with the wrong step and you’ll end up giving up and putting the sliding puzzle into The Box of Stuff. Apparently, here is a whole branch of Very Serious Maths devoted to figuring out whether these puzzles are solvable or not. A lot depends on the initial condition of the puzzle.

Now, I don’t want to be claiming that we are now experts in Group Theory because we gave away our own bed’s IKEA Brimnes Headboard With Storage in order to create room. But I don’t think we could have switched the children’s bedroom with my home office without that important initial step. 

Our status as mathematicians is undermined a bit though. We got rid of the headboard on the local Swap WhatsApp group. In her ad, my wife meant to say there were traces of paint on the headboard but instead wrote ‘traces of pain on the headboard’. So now the neighbours think we’re into That Kind Of Thing.

But despite all the grunting and the swearing (I’m referring to the furniture moving), I underestimated how much of a difference it made. The excitement of the children at moving bedroom, reminds me of nine-year-old me moving bedroom. My brother had moved out of home so there was a ‘shakeup’. 

I looked forward to it for months and it was everything I’d dreamt it to be. The bed faced a different way. There was a radio. Waking from that first new sleep I felt anything was possible. 

Years before the self-improvement boom which strains tables in bookshops everywhere, I’d unlocked the secret of how to get your shit together in primary school. It turns out it’s about embracing change. And being okay with a Box of Unsorted Stuff.

• Speaking of rooms, Colm plays City Limits Comedy Club on Coburg St. this Saturday night.