On Moving

My personality is not very compatible with the process of moving. I tend to like things slow, settled, and ordered by the thorough process of time, like dust settled on the ocean floor. Once I have an order for things, that order does not change unless something external forces my hand.

When I put pictures up on the wall in their perfect places, meticulously hung, they stay in those exact spots, never to be moved or rearranged. The way I’ve ordered my books and knick-knacks on my bookshelf has stayed mostly unchanged the past three years.

But I am moving again. I’ve done this at least once every year–sometimes more– for the last eight years of my life.

I’m getting smarter with moving. I know myself now. In the past, I have spent hours–and I do mean literal hours–arranging and rearranging furniture to get it right in my new living space. In the past, I’ve painstakingly racked my brain to remember how it was I had arranged my books and souvenirs and artifacts on my bookshelf and desk, because doing it differently just didn’t feel right.

By now, I’ve learned what the rules are and I’ve learned how to live with them. The bed is ideally near a window. I must not have my back to the door when sitting at my desk. Windows should not be blocked by my dresser or bookshelf. Consider the view from the outside looking through the window. Consider the view from the door to the room looking in. Do not block heating ducts. Consider convenient loci of electrical outlets in proximity to desk and bedside table respectively.

“What if I stop being so picky and just do it differently this time?” I used to wonder. But this was almost always followed by cursing myself later as I re-rearranged the furniture in accordance to the rules which simply will not be broken.

By now, I can anticipate my perfectionism, and I don’t ridicule myself for being so doggedly obsessive about my private living space. This time around, I took a picture of my bookshelf before packing everything away to better facilitate its restoration. This time, I brought a tape measure to my new room to pre-plan where my furniture will go so I can get it right on the first try. This time, the sea creature stirring up dust on my settled ocean floor will not steep me in chaos for long. I will bring my order with me.

Change, chosen or not, doesn’t ever stop happening–you just get a little better at parrying its blows.

For me, the physical act of moving almost always feels a little bad. This is because I don’t process change until the change becomes physical. I don’t feel the bittersweet emptiness of a life season’s end until my actual room is empty. Novelty is not real until I’m staring at the new ceiling in my new room on my first night of a new chapter.

Inevitably, moving forces me to confront all the little pet projects that I never quite got around to. Here is the stack of letters and postcards that I never wrote replies to. Here is the shirt with the missing button I was going to resew. Here are all the books accumulated from thrift stores which have not been put on my bookshelf, because I may need them for quick reference for the writing project that I still have not completed.

Invariably, packing up my things takes forever, and there’s no way around it. That’s another rule I’ve learned to live with: packing takes forever. Any expectation to the contrary will only be met with frustration.

It isn’t enough just to put things in boxes. Moving becomes, by some inner compulsion, a time to undergo a complete inventory of all my belongings, assessing their practical and symbolic value to me, and deciding what stays and what goes.

This time, and not any other time, is the time to go through all my unworn clothing. This time, not later, is the time to get rid of one more symbolic trinket from high school. This is the time, upon reaching the shelf containing my old journals and notebooks, to divine nostalgia from the entries of a younger me who, although he has changed almost indescribably since the years he first wrote on those pages, has simultaneously stayed almost exactly the same.

In fact, it’s the objects most tied to childhood and adolescence that are hardest to move past with any efficiency–I won’t tell you you how old I was when I finally threw away the tattered remnants of my baby blanket–and personal journals or diaries are probably hardest of all. These things are a black hole, activated only when it’s time to pack and move.

I’m pretty amazed at how productive I become at everything else when there is one activity I don’t care to do. Instead of dealing with the clutter in my half-disassembled bedroom, for example, I am in the living room, writing this. This completed essay was written almost entirely in one sitting–I couldn’t have done that if I had tried. Maybe it’s my own way of giving the finger to forced transition. You can make me leave, but I’m gonna do it my own way in my own time. Or maybe I’m just good at living in the moment, soaking in what’s important rather than fretting about transition. Or maybe it’s just straight up denial.

Most probably, it’s a mix of all three.

—–

Contrast this with my housemate Sagen, my good friend who I have lived with for four out of the last five years of my life. Sagen begins mourning and celebrating change sometimes months in advance. He tastes it in the air in the same way elephants perceive impending hurricanes and start marching inland long before humans do. When we found out that our landlord was going to sell the house sooner than expected, Sagen’s change-adaptation systems kicked in right away. Almost overnight, our conversation and activities shifted from the routine  tell-me-about-your-day variety to a distinctive brand of reflective comments from Sagen, such as, “It’s been a real good time in this house,” or, “We’ve really had it good, haven’t we?” or, “I’m really going to miss living here. We’ve had it really good.”

He started making comments like this the day or two after we found out we’d have to move, even though we we still had a month or more to go in the house.

—–

By packing up your things, you are unpacking all of the memories and value and meaning that they hold. In the face of the newness of the life you are moving into–or away from–each object must be reassessed in light of that newness. This process for me has become familiar. I’ve changed a lot these last five years, but those changes aren’t reflected too much in lifestyle and the belongings that reflect it. I have been confining my belongings to a single room in accordance with a lifestyle of a single, working bachelor for a good while now. I have not married, and so my belongings have not had to pass the scrutiny of a spouse. I have not moved from a single room to a full-sized house of my own, nor from a full house to a single room, and so no considerable upsizing or downsizing has occurred. My hobbies are mostly the same, and so all of the relevant paraphernalia makes the cut each time.

Our living spaces and the things that we fill them with say a lot about us. They are a reflection of our very selves: who we are, what we like, where we’ve been, what we aspire to. In my room, I have a piece of art from each significant geographic location that I have lived in to remind me of those places and the memories they hold. I have photographs of my family next to books containing ideas that have defined me. I have aesthetic knickknacks and decorations galore: coasters made from Douglas fir rounds; tealight candles placed in thrifted glass teacups; a leather throw from the Bavarian Lodge in Leavenworth, WA gifted to me by a former housemate; symbolic trinkets from trips to El Salvador, New York, Boston, South Africa, and Nebraska.

And I have what you may call a strong affinity for containers. Tins, cups, baskets, jars, and boxes of all kind made from wood, ceramic, straw, glass, tin, plastic, and cardboard are everywhere in my living space. These are as varied in their history as their make and model: the jar holding a candle that used to contain Adams Peanut Butter during my year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps; the pencil box carved from mango tree wood left behind by a former roommate; the rectangular porcelain thing purchased at flea market because I couldn’t resist the color and texture–it now holds my wallet, keys, and receipts; a mug from my college dining hall. These containers are the artifacts of a museum. They are a short history of Jonathan Strain.

Moving is the labor of self-reflection and self-confrontation. As each thing comes into your hand to be packed away for the next chapter, you ask yourself, “What is this, what does it do for me, does it still have value or meaning for me now, and will it still have meaning or value for me in this next season?”

Personally, it’s no surprise to me that moving becomes such an episode of minor trauma. It’s exhausting to reevaluate your own identity multiple times in a year.

I have a personality that is highly attuned to the symbolic meanings of my things, which is maybe why moving is extra difficult for me. Just when I think I have everything defined, settled, in its place, subdued, and known, yet another “life transition” comes along and blows it all to bits again.

But not everyone is like this. My personal traumas are another person’s adventure and lifeblood. For some, moving is an opportunity, a way out of stifling boredom and mundanity, freedom from the suffocating shackles of being tied down to an effete lifestyle. Sometimes I even catch a whiff of this sensation myself.

There are also the people who don’t reflect at all. They simply accrue so many things, having hauled them all from place to place, that their houses and garages are so stuffed with stuff that a confrontation of this stuff’s history and what it says about them is just a little too harrowing to even broach, and so they just deal with it by not dealing with it at all.

To each their own.

—–

Physical stuff is one thing when you are moving. Live relationships with other people are quite another. I’ve lived Sagen for four out of the last five years of my life. That’s a long time to live with someone who isn’t your spouse or family member. We share similar values and outlooks on life. We want the same things from a living space. And, ultimately, we’ve just been pretty lucky. Our lives have taken similar enough courses that it has made sense to keep living together, even in the midst of all the turbulent and divisive changes that happen in your 20’s. We’ve been lucky enough to keep finding jobs or pursuits in which we grow and move forward that also keep us both in Spokane. At this point, we’re almost like an old married couple. We intuit each other’s grooves and rhythms with relative accuracy. The familiarity to me of sharing a living space with Sagen is so great, it’s almost banal.

Our friendship isn’t defined so much by crazy adventures or shared passions or constant, deep conversations, although we’ve certainly had those things in their own turn and form. Rather, it’s more the type of rare and companionate friendship that is the product of empathy, circumstance, and time. We see each other. And without too much fuss, we protect and honor what we see. We manage to lead different sorts of lives while maintaining a common respect and concern for each other that I don’t share with too many other people. In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, a favorite of both of ours, our friendship is one in which “each appoints the other the guardian of his solitude” (On Love and Other Difficulties).

—–

Moving is not just about trading one roof for another. It’s often indicative of bigger changes that are afoot, and even if you really are just changing locations, even a physical move can create subtle riffs and changes in your various relationships. Physical proximity is a huge factor in determining what kind of time you spend with who and when–much more than we usually realize. And while good friendships endure big or small shifts in proximity, they do not go unchanged by them.

A friendship is not any more immune to the demands of change than the rest of life. But if the friendship is a good one, it will have it’s own rules that it won’t be broken. It too will adapt. It will carry its order with it.

—–

Sagen is a master of ceremony. This is through intentional effort and also just because of who he is. He recognizes the important times and events in life and makes the importance manifest in rituals that are almost liturgical. Need to vent anger about a frustrating thing that happened to you? It’s nothing that a session with the Smash Bat can’t help. Need to process a life change? A walk and talk with a smoke late at night is just the thing. Did you get the job? Did you ask the girl on the date? Did you make a difficult but courageous decision about something? That calls for a toast with some of the fine whiskey from Sagen’s stash, which he will always share.

If you are celebrating a new life season, having a birthday, mourning a breakup, processing a big decision, or just want to have a party, Sagen is the person you want to have around. There is no noteworthy event in life that passes by his watch without some form of recognition. This is one of the reasons Sagen is such a good friend for me. I love to be recognized, but it’s not the same if I have to ask for it.

It’s partially because he’s been disappointed by too many unrecognized changes in his own life. Letdowns gone unmourned. Victories passed uncelebrated. But beneath that is something more automatic, more innate.

He has his own rules to follow in the face of transition, after all, and he too has learned to adapt.

—–

Still, Sagen’s preemptive initiative of Last Rites seemed a little insulting to me at first, something akin to talking about someone in the past tense who hasn’t actually died yet. Not only did he start all this a month or two early, it was being done in the face of a move that isn’t about big life changes quite yet. Our landlord is simply selling the house sooner than we anticipated, so it’s time to find somewhere new to go before the real transition happens. We will still, at this point, both be in Spokane for several more months. But with a little more thought, I see that he is right in his witness of endings. Things are about to be very different.

This might be a crass binary, but our instinctive responses to big change might be thus: Sagen acknowledges outright the reality of what is changing, while I hold fast to what need not change at all.

In this, we sort of shield each other from the transitional brisance. We are celebrants. Witnesses. Guardians of solitude.

—–

Most of the weirdness of moving and transitioning is how commonplace it all is. If you are lucky, you have people in your life to help you see the sacredness of change. But most of us do not have this. Moving is often just one of those things that happens to you and you deal with it. We might crave recognition for the important changes in our lives, but we don’t know how to ask for it.

—–

Eventually, we will all have to move, physically or otherwise, from where we are now to somewhere new, and the move will happen with our consent or without it. Even if you live in the same place the rest of your life, you will have to make other kinds of moves: relational, spiritual, emotional, and so on. We will move over and over again until our bodies are moved, finally, into the earth. It is our rite as pilgrims and aliens of the world.

Soon, if not today, you will find yourself standing at the threshold of your now empty home, dust bunnies in the corner, skeletal coat hangers on the floor, one lone extension cord which, having slithered away beneath a couch who knows how long ago, is now exposed. When you are in this moment, you will see that place for the home that it was and for the empty space it now is. And you will leave it for a strange new place that has not yet accommodated itself to you, for a place that you do not know.

When you find yourself in the doorway between from and to, with no witnesses or closure or form through which to name how frightening, bittersweet, and strange it is, know that Sagen and I invite you into the heart of the celebration and mourning of that which changes, as well as into the heart of companionship and love which never does. We raise up our glasses. We see you.