One of the concerns I had about our recent move was the amount of waste we would produce in the process. One never understands quite how much shit she owns until she goes to pack up her house and move across town.
All in all, I’ll say we did a pretty good job. All of our house trash fit into the large trash bin we set out by the road each week, and then we donated our dining room set, my old desk, two small accent chairs, a side table, and countless little items before closing day. We’ve since broken down about twenty-five large cardboard boxes, with more on the way. Recycling in our new city is done on a limited basis so we can only fit about eight boxes in each week, meaning it’s going to take a lot more time to rid ourselves of the leftovers. But I’m trying to be okay with that. (We had some friends take a car load for us this weekend, though; hooray for kind friends!)
This no/low-buy experiment has revealed much about my impatience with life. I’m not good at letting things be as they are; I’m forever on the lookout for ways to improve. The problem with this viewpoint is that it often paralyzes instead of catalyzes me. I become overwhelmed by all of what needs to be done…so then nothing gets done. For this move, I’m taking a page out of my husband’s book and eating the elephant one bite—or one cardboard box—at a time.
Unpacking slowly is more gentle on my soul, but it means I also have to be extra mindful not to go out and just buy a replacement for whatever random item I cannot find in the pile of boxes in our garage. I have to take my time and look. It’s there somewhere, after all. What condition it’s in at the moment, I cannot say, but I know it’s there. Funnily enough, I’ve found some items have even been forgotten altogether! It’s only once we open a box that we find said item tucked away inside and go, “Oh, yeah. That.”
A thing that was once so important I took my debit card out to purchase it, bring it home, and find a place for it. Now I don’t even remember I own it until it’s right in front of me. I’ve imagined taking every box we haven’t opened to Goodwill and dropping them off sight unseen—let them be someone else’s problem!—but then I cringe because I’m a far cry from having that sort of courage and our consumer habits are largely other people’s problems already.
Material freedom is a nice dream, but I like my stuff. There’s no harm in that. But we’ve all become locked into the idea that we deserve what we want right this very second and I don’t think it’s actually making us any happier. It’s just making us inept. Moving has shown me how much I hate to wait, to be without, but the effort to take this at a slower pace and resist the temptation to spend or immediately replace an item without consideration of whether I need said item is worth it. If we never take the time to ask what we’re doing with our stuff, then we’ll never get to the bottom of what our stuff is doing to us.
Last week, while my mom was visiting, she bought me The Tortured Poets Department on vinyl—the special clear edition—and then it turned out to have two side C/D records instead of an A/B and C/D. When I went to listen and see if it was just a mislabel instead of a duplicate, I realized that my record player got busted in the move. This is my second of these players, the first of which lasted for seven years before my toddler got his hands on it, and I’ve only had it for a year. My first thought when I realized it was broken was, “Ugh, now I have to go and buy a new one.”
But I don’t.
I can ask a friend to help, or I can take it to an actual record shop, or I can tinker with it myself by watching a YouTube video. Convenience has its place; I’m a mother, I know. It just doesn’t need to dictate our lives. The more we work to practice resistance in this way, the more we take time to consider what we spend before we spend it, the more we build our capacity for all the wonderful things in life that are only made good with time.
That’s what I want most from this year. I want go more analog with my time—literally! I have a wind-up clock and everything!—and with my attention. I want to slow down and breathe. I want to look around at what I have and see what is rather than what should or could be. I want to wait well.
Right now, as I write these words, our son is playing in the overgrown front yard with his big sister. It’s full of white clover and they’re picking bouquets, the sweet smell adrift on the breeze. Just this morning, I walked outside and wished for an unknown moment when the yard would be overgrown with flowers and shrubs and bird baths, pretty and aesthetically pleasing and done. But this moment with my kids makes me pause.
What we have right now—stuff in boxes and an unmowed lawn—makes this memory possible.
What we have is already enough.