Notes on a move

If you find it in your house, throw it out!

We moved recently. By “recently” I mean in the past week. So our house is still sort of being unpacked, although we’re mostly done on that front. We strategized to get our beds, dressers and kitchen quickly unpacked—you can’t get much done if you’re sleepless, naked and unfed—and then we spent the rest of the week getting everything else unboxed. It worked.

It’s astonishing to see much of what you’ve accumulated in your life reduced to a rolling series of cardboard squares. Moving is a profound experience. Popular opinion holds that it’s one of the great difficult experiences of life: Some polls indicate that, for many people, moving is more stressful than divorce—which is astonishing when you consider that divorce itself generally occasions at least one move of its own! But the aversion is understandable. Moving incorporates about fifteen different major stressors: Huge logistics, massive life changes, the end of the familiar, the beginning of the new, financial outlays, physical labor, many other things. It’s rough stuff, even when you really want it. Coming to the end of a move is like coming to the end of a transatlantic voyage in the 17th century: You collapse on your knees, kiss the ground, and vow you’re never going out there again.

Here are a few things of note from the last several months of this move, from the earliest planning stages to the final unloading:

Plan, plan, plan. Few things are as inimical to an easy move as bad planning. Mrs. Morris the Elder happens to be a fantastic long-term planner and I happen to be a decent short-term planner, and between the two of us we scraped together a pretty serviceable effort. I should note, as a pretty major aside, that this move was in fact two moves as once: My mother offered to swap houses with us, her larger house being much more suited to our family and our smaller house being much more suited to her onesome. This was a boon for everyone and an inestimable blessing, and it also meant that we had to effectively plan for two separate moves, happening effectively at the same time, to the same two houses. You can imagine the sheer logistical chaos that can easily result from such a complex dance. But we planned very thoroughly starting from the outset of the whole process and it came off amazingly, almost unbelievably smoothly. It was hard work but it flowed well and without major hitches. Plan well, and well ahead, and you, too, can move without having a brain aneurysm.

Moving with four children is not the same as moving. Most everyone has moved at some point in their lives. This isn’t the 18th century anymore where you live and die under the same sticky log cabin roof. Sometimes you just gotta go! And I think we all remember what it was like to move as a 19-year-old: You throw your Cheez-Its and Playstation 2 in some garbage bags, you toss your childhood dresser into the back of a buddy’s Tacoma, you drag all that stuff into some disgusting apartment over near the city lockup, and you’re good. But when you have kids it’s, you know, a bit different. We’ve got four of them, all under seven years old, so it’s very different. During the leadup to the move you have to make sure they’re not too psychologically discombobulated by the prospect of it all—as with adults, kids get bamboozled by a move, they go through the same psychological shock that adults do and they’re worse at hiding it, so you have to address that. During the move itself you have to figure out what to do with them. Kids do not stop being kids just because it’s moving day; they need distraction, support, validation, reassurance, instructions, food, the whole nine yards. Gone are the days, at least temporarily, when you could just sort of casually throw everything into a box and move. You can’t do that with your kids, much as you might like to at points. They must be factored into the planning.

Moving is a memento mori. Okay, this one feels a little grim, maybe, but it’s true. If this move has demonstrated anything legitimately revelatory to me, it’s this: I’m not 25 anymore. I’m not even 30. We’re up past those years and well beyond them. My physical strength and my energy levels are not those of a young man anymore. Part of that could be that, as I said, we have four kids and a considerable amount of that strength and energy has been diverted toward them. That’s fine and as it should be. But beyond that the fact of the matter is I’ve simply gotten older. I tire more quickly and ache more easily and recover more slowly. My corpus has begun its descent toward middle age, like an old Radio Flyer wagon beginning the long slide down Upmarket Hill into the bad part of town. This happens to all of us, and we should thank God that we live in an era of human history where “middle age” is actually a thing and not just the stretch of time where you’re most likely to be eaten alive by a saber-toothed tiger. But it’s still sobering. A man can’t help but think of the time when he used to be real gasoline, just a walking talking Charles Atlas on wheels. Time was I could move six tractor-trailer loads of crap and still run a mile afterwards. But it all must come to an end. This is the natural way of things and it is nothing to be afraid of or angry about. But there is something to mourn here, at least briefly. If you haven’t moved for several years and you move in your mid-30s, you’re going to learn this. Ah well, embrace it.

You don’t need all these things. Our unique moving arrangement allowed us to essentially know the exact day and time we’d be moving into our new home. We were able to leverage that knowledge to rent a Pod and actually pack up our stuff methodically over the course of about two weeks. This was an easy and orderly way to go about doing this and, whenever possible, this is how I’d recommend people move. It was also rather revealing in a materialistic sense: If you pack up maybe 70% of your belongings ahead of a move, you’ll discover that you don’t actually really need many of those things. Spoiler alert: They’ve been in a box in a Pod for many days and you probably haven’t missed them that much! Think about it. If you can pack a thing away and forget about it for maybe weeks at a time, maybe you didn’t need that thing. Or the other thing. Or the other one. It’s an instructive experience and a useful one for stripping your life of its acquisitive trappings.

Thing can actually be sort of nice though. It’s fashionable to make that sort of observation, of course—“You don’t need so many things!”—and it’s true, too, but it also misses a rather large point about the human experience itself. Emptying our entire lives into a Pod over the course of about half a month taught us something: Things are, if done right, actually a somewhat important part of our daily existence. We got to feel the rather slow and at times surprisingly painful burn of seeing the accumulation of our life disappear a little bit, day by day. And when you do this you find that, whatever else their purpose or function, things serve as a reminder of the life you’ve built for yourself and are still building. At their best, your personal possessions are supposed to remind you of good people and goodness: They are supposed to orient your life properly, to direct you toward the things of matter and importance in your life. That random knickknack that your mother gave you might seem like something that you can toss, and maybe it is, but then again when you look at it you think about your mother and all that she’s done for you and all that you should do for her in return, and that’s a good thing. Maybe you don’t need that jumbo-sized old 1920s whisk in your kitchen, but then again it’s a thing of craftsmanship and beauty, it’s a pleasure to use, and its presence in your kitchen can measurably increase the joy and ease of your daily life. Do you need so many books? Most certainly not, technically. But books are filled with knowledge, and knowledge, as Helen Keller observed, is “love and light and vision,” all very good things. These are all worthwhile pursuits. It’s very easy to totter off into hoarderism and rapaciousness on this track, so you have to be careful that you’re not just holding onto something because it’s been there for a bit. But aside from that, I would argue controversially that most of us actually need a house full of stuff, to remind us and ground us and keep us focused and centered and purposeful. We’re not all ascetics and we’re not all readily called to be ascetics. Be judicious in how many things you have in your house, and don’t be ashamed of the ones that are important to you.

That said, throw a lot of your things out. Good grief, when you’re packing it’s never a better time to purge. You’ll find things of little value and no meaning to you all over the place, things you never thought could fit inside a Brentwood mansion, let alone your little house. Be aggressive in getting rid of all that stuff. You might hold it in your hands, turn it over, think, “Gee, I’ve had this for so long, I don’t want to throw it out.” Ignore that voice. Make a box; put all that stuff in the box; take the box to the thrift store or the dump. Lighten your load and leave only the things you really value in your house.

Be uncompromisingly judicious in how you use your friends for your move. Seinfeld had it right: Asking a friend to help you move is a big deal. The move is a big life event and you should only involve your closest friends in it. Beyond that, you absolutely shouldn’t subject them to any more work than you absolutely must: When you ask your friends to “help you move,” let it be to help you move, not pack or organize or strategize. On the day of the move itself, have everything ready to rock and roll: Everything in boxes, organized near the door, the truck ready to load, the furniture ready to lift. Your buddies should be able to roll up in their car, roll up their sleeves, and literally get moving. If they show up and your house is still being packed up and the truck reservation isn’t for another two hours and you’re expecting them to start throwing stuff in boxes, they’ll be 100% forgiven if they turn around and walk out and only come back when the move itself is happening. You call in your crew of flunkies for the hard labor of moving, not for the grating and mundane process of actually packing everything up. There’s an etiquette here and if you don’t follow it you’ll be blacklisted, and you’ll deserve it.

Unpack quickly! One last final bit of advice: Unpack in your new home as quickly as possible. Really blaze through it. If you see an unpacked box and you have seven minutes, grab it and unpack it. Do this constantly and you’ll be mostly unpacked in about a week. Living in a sea of unpacked and semi-unpacked cardboard boxes is no way to live. Don’t subject yourself to that torment. Unpack and be done with it!