Ides of March

An element of our situation that I was thinking about today is how we are nearly constantly over the past 7 years either going through the process of settling in or the process of gearing up to move. I noted yesterday that one of our consideration regarding possessions that we keep is often how well we can pack it around.
Most people can attest that the process of really moving in to a new place, unpacking, hanging pictures, decorating takes several months. And then there’s however much time it takes to make the space your own by purchasing a few new items or a piece of furniture that really fits the space well. Andrea and I really only did this in one of the spaces that we lived in, really allowed ourselves to unwind and made the space our own in several ways. We creatively painted the walls in several rooms, I customized an office space to fit my grad school studying needs and my hobby of selling on ebay. And we really began to live in such a way that lacked worry about the things we owned and how difficult it would be to move them.
Tying back into my original thought, moving out of somewhere takes its own time to happen as well. The searching for a new place to live, acquiring boxes and packing. In a couple of our cases, we attempted living with other couples/families, so there was the time and energy spent planning those mergers. In several cases, there has been an overlap of these two processes, the settling in and the gearing up.
The other day Andrea was talking to me about a couple she knew that intentionally moved into difficult neighborhood and have made efforts to connect with neighbors, to clean up the area and act with others to improve the area. I had a flash of envy and wishing that we could have that kind of impact–then it clicked internally that we don’t live in such a way to facilitate that kind of interaction. That seems to dovetail with the above thoughts. If the time and energy spent moving in, settling down, gearing up and moving out were spent elsewhere, what could our life be like?

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.