Last week when I was in Michigan for a few days visiting family, I had the experience of helping my son Ron and his family pack their possessions for a move to a new house.
This was not the first time, but I suspect it may be the last. I don't think they will be moving again anytime soon.
Moving can be such a pain. In fact, I felt like a hundred years old the next day! All that lifting and bending and pushing and pulling, etc. took its toll on my elder's body! I enjoyed the time with my family however.
It took many hours just to put all the stuff in the kitchen in boxes. And I know lots of people who have much more in their kitchens than they do. How do we manage to accumulate so much stuff? Why do we burden ourselves with so much more than we need, and complicate our lives with things are supposed to make them easier? Well, maybe some of them do, sort of. (Like blenders? toaster ovens?) But we could do very well without an awful lot of it.
I shudder to think of what moving my kitchen, much less all the rest of the stuff in the house, would be like after we have lived there over twenty years. We have accumulated a lot! One nice thing about moving is the opportunity to go through everything and get rid of a lot of it. And we have not done that for way too long. I think I will put that high on my list of things I want to get done in Michigan this spring and summer.
Actually, upon reflection, I think moving is less of a pain and has more profit in it than I had thought. For one thing, moving, I have found, makes me stretch and grow and push my comfort zone. I have to break old habits, create new ones, adjust to new surroundings, new people, and a different way of life in many ways. This gives me a wonderful chance to create new possibilities for my life.
The same is true internally. Its a good thing to move in terms of my mind, my soul, my spirit, as well as my body and external life. It is all too easy to get stuck in ruts and become all too comfortable when things stay too much the same over time. Sameness can lead to stagnation. In the retirement community in which we live in Arizona, I see that in the lives of some of our neighbors. Or at least, it looks that way from the outside. Maybe a lot of moving is going on in their inner lives. Who knows? I just know that I want to keep moving, even though I don't want to do that externally and literally right now. But I want to keep moving
in my inner life. I want to review some of the stuff sitting around in my mind and soul and ask if it really is something I still want, or whether it might not be a good thing to get rid of. I want to simplify some more, and get down to basics, and not burden myself with all kinds of memories, ideas, attitudes, and patterns that do not serve me and just weigh me down at this stage in my life.
How about you? Boxes, anyone?
No comments:
Post a Comment