Moving

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” – William Morris

We are preparing to move at least three times in the span of the next few months, and it is like torture. Moving is possibly worse than labor. Definitely. Right now it involves packing up all our stuff into storage, leaving our furniture in our current place, and moving with a few suitcases to another furnished apartment for two months (so our owners can sell our current living place). Then it will involve lugging everything out of state to our new place. Presumably a house we will have bought. Otherwise to a temporary place, which I try not to think about because my mind can’t manage that at the moment.

I fondly think of the day two months after we were married where we loaded up everything we owned on earth into a minivan and drove down the east coast. A minivan. I think the biggest item we owned at the time was an office chair.

But of course this is a good time to consider what it means to live in simplicity. I used to think about that a lot when I was younger: about this discipline of simplicity, what it means to have an inward life focused only on what mattered most, and to have this outwardly reflected in the things I did and what I owned and surrounded myself with.

Life seems to have gotten more complicated since then. We’ve expanded from one room, to a one-bedroom apartment, to this three-story condo, and now perhaps to a whole house. Our immaterial lives seem the same: more weighed by responsibility, less abandoned to the spiritual and communal.

Parenting is like this too. It can seem complicated. We’re on this email list for local parents, and it seems to be full of people looking for advice on the best toy, or activity, or swim instructor for toddlers. But I like how we’ve kept E surrounded with relatively simple things. She has a few used toys and clothes; her activities are mostly drawing or reading, exploring the house or outdoors. We talk and laugh and pray. We hang out with her, which I think is the most important thing.

So I’m trying to approach this packing in the same way. What do I really need? What brings me joy and beauty? And I’m looking forward to having a place of our own. Secretly I’m obsessing about finally getting to do some interior design, but really it will be nice to have a place to settle for a while. More on that later.