Moving In

So. We’ve just completed our big move. Since I’d begun packing up my apartment in late June, it seems we have been swimming in boxes. What I had proudly been thinking of as our “simple” households turned out to be physically and emotionally exhausting to combine, load, haul, unload, unpack and organize.

The final push to put away the few clothes, books, files and pie-making tools we brought to the already-furnished home we’re renting in Fort Collins turned out to almost be my undoing. We were at the end of our energy and sick-to-death of boxes. Where had all of this stuff come from anyway? When we took a break to go get our new coffee grinder, I walked into a store full of housewares and immediately felt sick to my stomach. All I could see on the shelves were thousands of things that someday – somewhere — would have to be moved.

Moving is exciting. I love the sense of starting fresh, discovering new places, opening up to new possibilities. But my worst moments in this move have come when there was so much movement I couldn’t take it in and I couldn’t make it stop. When my patience had worn thin and there was still a bedlam of clothes lying around, when too many boxes were labeled “misc.” and had to be dragged between rooms, what I wanted more than anything was some safe, stable corner of predictability and sameness. I ached for simplicity and stillness.

Decades ago, an artist neighbor told me, “you gotta have a good chaos going before any order can grow out of it.” Our chaos of bubble wrap and strapping tape crested and gave way to new organized cupboards and closets. I can find the cinnamon and that pair of hand-knit socks again. But I will never be able to stop change, never control the pace of loss or gain. Everything moves and keeps moving.

Still.

I believe simplicity is possible anyway. I believe sustained stability can unroll from the inside out.

And now that all our things are unpacked, I want to give my full attention to unpacking the truth about living a quiet life. I want to move so deep into simplicity of soul that I never have to load up and move again, no matter how many times my address may change.