Helping my father move.
Packing up a home — this goes to storage, that goes to the new place — can be a psychic chore. Packing up someone else is hard enough. I can’t imagine what it’s like for him, packing up his own life.
This is for the second time. The first time he downsized from a 3,000 square foot two-story house to a two-bedroom mobile home. Now it’s a 900 square foot one-bedroom apartment in a retirement facility.
How do you go from fully autonomous to living in a place you know might be your last home? Oof. Heavy thought. How do you continue to shed possessions, simply because you must?
At least he will be living just a few blocks from me.
Many of these things are familiar to me from my childhood. Others are familiar to me for less time, but still identifies with him. To the extent I look at the thing and create an opinion, an attachment . . . it’s hard. To the extent that I show up for duty, purely to be helpful . . . it’s easy.
Lessons exist everywhere we choose to find them.
- Nothing is good or bad except that thinking makes it so. (Or whatever Billy S. wrote 400 years ago.)
- Do you know what feels good? Just show up and help, for fun and for free (as the old timers would tell me long ago when I was a noob).
- And a more practical one: throw shit away, with glee and gratitude. Why do you think they call them possessions? Because they possess you. (Why put a secondhand toaster into paid storage? What possible value is there in keeping it?)
That last one is a son of a bitch to get past. I look at things that I own. Maybe I bought them, maybe someone gave them to me. They are of no value to me today. Yet I can’t bring myself to throw it away. It has some psychic value to me, just because it’s mine. It’s useless (maybe even detrimental), but it’s mine.
Give it away. Throw it away. Don’t even think of selling it. The value is in the “gone.”
This is a lesson I need to apply in my own life.