It was a great day.

We just finished (around 8:30 pm) a nice dinner with wine, while enjoying the lush green outside our window adorned with golden twilight (which Jung loves dearly) and the powder blue sky as a gentle background — completely nonchalant about the hail that poured out of it about an hour or two ago!

We worked hard all day — literally back-breaking work — since we woke up this morning before 7:00 am. (Charles has been getting up before 6:00 am every morning consistently for over a week now no matter what time he goes to bed at night.) We had a deadline to work against, which is quite rare these days, but it was a good one for us. We had a meeting scheduled at with our realtor Marc, at 1:00 pm. However, our home office and the guest room were not in decent enough shape to be shown.

Jung refrained from accompanying Charles and the girls to their school this morning so that she could squeeze in as much work as possible to declutter the office. We skipped our walk in the morning, too. We were on a mission to get the house in as ready as we could to show to our realtor! And we did get our mission accomplished by the time Marc arrived in our driveway.

We have to say our real winning act was the choice of our realtor, Marc. Well, Marc is also our attorney for the sale of our home. We found Marc at WALaw Realty when we were researching who to work with to sell our house. We were intrigued by WALaw’s business model which seemed quite innovative, and we like innovative businesses! When we spoke with him on the phone the first time, we liked him. When we met him today, we liked him even more. Jung liked him because he was on the same wavelength as her attorney-mind and Charles because of Marc’s sensible and economic mindset! (When Marc said, “I’m such a cheapskate that I do not like spending a lot of money!” Charles liked him immediately.)

What we like most about Marc is that we feel like we have a good partner and guide to work with in selling our home. This is the fourth time we are selling real property and we have had our share of dealings with realtors. Fortunately, we have had good experiences with most of them (either buying or selling real property), but we were never quite sure how much to trust them. Because trustworthiness is a big value of ours in personal and business dealings, we feel fortunate to work with a professional who will work for and with us without a conflict of interest that seems to be unavoidable in real estate transactions involving sales agents.

Marc was explaining to us about the quirkiness of current real estate market. In a nutshell, it sounded nutty! There are a lot of moving parts in the current market, and we heard that there are instances of multiple bids in a “sweet spot” range of home prices. Not something we had anticipated to hear, and we are not in that range in any event, but when it comes to pricing the sale price, it appears that as much art is involved as science. We suspect that such has been the case all along in the real estate business, but we have not been in the market to sell (or buy) a house since 2004 when it was clearly a sellers’ market, so it was helpful to get Marc’s perspective and insight.

It reminded us again that we need to befriend uncertainty. The real estate market of 2012 is a lot less predictable than the real estate market of 2004 when we sold our house in Lexington, Massachusetts over a weekend. Somehow, we felt a quiet and steady assurance nonetheless. It could have been the confidence we gained after getting the house decluttered enough to show to Marc — the genuine feeling we felt in our gut that says, “We can handle this!” Or it could have been finding a collaborator who is innovative and on the same wavelength as us. It may be little bit of both.

All in all, we feel guided by invisible hands looking after us. It is hard to explain it rationally, but definitely there is a sense that we are loved and being taken care of by the forces that are beyond us. The same forces that makes the trees green, the sky blue, and the twilight golden with perfect timing! Right now, although we are deep in the middle of the dark tunnel, our gratitude and joy are full to the brim. Somehow, we feel that everything will work out just fine. Even if we do not get what we want, we know that we will get what we need. Especially if we follow Charles’ guideline for what we need: he thinks that we overuse the word “need.” True, we actually need much less than we think. That will help us keep on track to purge as much as we can!