May
1
I feel like I have been packing and packing, going through screechy rolls of tape and dizzying myself with Marks-a-Lot fumes and emptying out drawers and shelves and closets and filling box after box, and sometimes I look at the growing towers that are taking over the living room and it seems like I’ve made an enormous amount of progress and sometimes the stacks look like exactly what they are: a very small percentage of the total square footage of crap we have to jam into one 26′ moving truck in a few weeks.
There are the existing boxes and things that have yet to be packed and all of our furniture and also everything in here:
I succumbed to logistics-related panic yesterday and we decided JB would drive a trailer full of stuff when he heads to Eugene this weekend and maybe we’ll end up doing that again, depending on what kind of dent it makes, but my biggest fear is that come May 25th, we’ll fill up the big yellow Penske and find that we don’t have quite enough room.
And really, that’s a valid concern because it would obviously suck, but I’m pretty sure I’m laser-focused on the packing situation because it’s marginally easier than freaking out about the big picture of moving into a house with a short-term lease and renting vs. buying and where it is, exactly, we’ll be living when Riley’s school starts at the end of summer. Will all the pieces eventually fit? Or will we look back and think, damn, we should have planned that better?
I don’t know, and I guess that’s the theme of this whole move: stepping outside our comfort zones and making uncertain decisions based on what limited information we have. Sometimes I’m so excited I can’t wait to see what happens next. But jesus, sometimes I just want to flip past the stressful part of this story to the part where it all works out just fine.
Apr
25
In March of 2010 I took an online Mondo Beyondo class. Their website does a much better job than I can at describing what it’s all about, but I found it deeply rewarding, and I’m not really the woo-woo let’s-explore-our-feelings type. I’m more into burying feelings under a comforting layer of junk food, you know? For the purpose of emotional blunting, I find that Ben & Jerry’s Blueberry Vanilla Graham frozen Greek yogurt really does a bang-up job.
Anyway. One of the assignments involved putting a message out into the world. I chose the section of a grocery store where I hoped it would be discovered by a frazzled new mom who might appreciate a random note from the universe:
My favorite assignment, though, was to ‘create a clearing.’ This was described in the class as:
A clearing is a wide open empty space in your life that is ready for something new or amazing to emerge. A clearing can be a cleaned-out closet or a regularly unscheduled Saturday. A clearing can be dissolving an unproductive business partnership or going to bed early two days in a row. A clearing can be saying no to a pesky friend or saying yes to a forbidden treat. A clearing can be as simple as taking out the trash or as serious as leaving a job or ending a not-so healthy relationship. A clearing can be recycling that piece of furniture you never really liked, not for one second.
However you choose to create your clearing, the point is that you let go of something in your life that has no purpose anymore, drains your energy, or draws your attention in a direction that leaves you feeling more burdened than free.
Man, that one really spoke to me. I was still at Workplace then, frustrated and unhappy and feeling trapped in a bad situation I couldn’t seem to improve. So my interpretation of the assignment was to clear the living shit out of my office. I cleaned all the clutter and junk—every drawer, every shelf. I recycled things I no longer needed. I dusted. I took home every knick-knack and keepsake. I removed every single photo, everything about the room that made it mine, because I wanted all my energy to be focused on me leaving that place.
Coworkers jokingly asked me if I was quitting, and I laughed and said of course not.
Six months later, I did.
I think about that assignment a lot. I mean, I’m not saying the simple act of tidying up my office made a difference … but who knows. Maybe it did. Maybe that was the start of a brand new path, one that eventually led us to the place we are now. If I was still tied to that job, there’s no way we’d be moving to Oregon.
Dreams never die. A-fucking-men.
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