I have a fantasy about a house. It’s a tiny house my husband and I pass every afternoon on our walk. It sits over a one-car garage, and couldn’t possibly contain anything larger than a twin bed, a dormroom-sized refrigerator, and a minuscule bathroom. On the front porch–which is just large enough for a chair and a hanging plant–there sits a tiny long-haired terrier who surveys us quietly as we go by. The house is barely bigger than a self.

My husband and I live a half mile away in a house that is nearly 3000 square feet. We have an acre yard that until two months ago was the province of my two very elderly cocker spaniels, Shark and Bella. On our generous deck is a table the size of a small boat, which we bought because we have 10 friends we see every month, and we wanted to be able to seat everyone comfortably. It’s a lovely house and we got it for a steal when the market was soft. My favorite room is an upstairs garret where I do my writing and life coaching.

And yet my heart aches every time we pass the little house with the little chair and the little dog. I tell my husband I just want to see inside. That I’m  curious about how it’s laid out, whether the stove is a 2-burner or 4, how the living room chairs are configured, if theres a tub or a stand-up shower (my bet’s on the shower). I  wonder if there’s a sofa.

The truth is I don’t want to just see inside the house, I want to move in. But not MOVE IN move in. No, what I want is something infinitely more abstract (and somehow literal at the same time). Here I think of Annie Dillard’s passage about waking into adulthood: “Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.” What I want is to live a life that fits me skin to skin: no wrinkles, no sagging parts, no excess. “Manageability” is the word I come up with for my husband, which is pretty good I think. There’s a great life coaching question, which is, “What if you were to think large?” So here’s a question: “What is the size of  your life, and what’s the size you want it to be?” Sometimes the urge to downsize might be a wish not to think small, but to trim excess, so that what needs to blossom can reach the light.