Andrea and I are settling into our new apartment which we have now inhabited for 26 days. Wow! Almost a month already. The process of moving in, unpacking, getting settled, figuring out where this and that should be placed or stored–all very familiar to our young, renting and mobile friends. We, however, have a unique relationship to this process. And we anticipate that the next several months will be spent reflecting and seeking some clarity on this. You see, in our nearly seven years of marriage, we have lived in nine different places. And if you take out the one place that we lived for two full years, that’s eight places in five years. We never really stopped to consider this until the last year or so. Each of the times that we have moved seem logical and necessary for its own sake. Some of our moves were out of necessity, others for cheaper rent or the need for more room for a child on the way. But, somewhere along the line, I realized I was asking friends to help load and unload furniture for the fourth or fifth time. And oddly enough, I have never had a friend balk at this. We have developed a lifestyle of moving. Just the other day, even as we are really wanting to stop this habit, we caught ourselves looking at a decorative piece of furniture and deciding that we needed to get rid of it because it was too difficult to “keep carting around.” That’s quite emblematic of our viewpoint–it’s not the “carting around” that needs to be scrutinized, it’s the possessions that can’t stand up the constant moving. In following days, I will post more thoughts and also reflections on the various places that we have lived.