Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Moving to Tranquility (Hopefully)

With a baby on the way, our one-bedroom apartment is officially too small - we would have had to put the new addition to the family in the kitchen sink. My husband and I have therefore elected to move! The good news: we found a great duplex in Sunnyvale. The not-so-good news: we've lived in the same apartment for the last ten years and have accumulated, accordingly, ten years of crap.

We have been packing each and every night since March 1st. My schedule is: work, come home and pack, eat, pack, sleep, then go to work, come home, pack, etc. Rinse and repeat. The apartment looks like a disaster area, with exploded mounds and piles of junk and papers and knick knacks and whatnot lying about as hazards.

I recognize, of course, being the spiritual athlete that I am, that this is a great opportunity to release "old things which do not serve me anymore," serving as a metaphor on the physical plane for all of those unwanted belief systems, attitudes, and philosophies that I should probably also be trashing on the metaphysical plane. I know that an uncluttered home leads to an unfettered mind, that you can't allow new things to come in without releasing the old. Yup, I am exceedingly familiar with all the usual adages and aphorisms. It's just that doing the physical work is so durned hard.

I started out by putting things into two piles: Things-I-Want and Things-I-Don't-Want-For-Sure. I saw that the first pile was still much bigger than the second, and much bigger than I had originally envisioned. So then I divided the Things-I-Want pile into the Things-I-Really-Want-to-Keep, the Things-I-Have-To-Keep-for-Legal-Reasons, and the Things-I'm-Attached-To-But-Cannot-Articulate-Why. It was this third pile I started going through and examining inner attachments as to WHY I felt I had to hold onto them. An example: my old trophies from the days I used to compete in beauty pageants - I never outright won any beauty pageants, by the way, but I did earn Miss Talent in one and First Runner-Up in another. After much meditating, I realized I had entered those pageants in the first place to somehow prove to others that I was pretty - as if they couldn't decide for themselves upon looking at me. It was a way to strongarm their perception, as it were: "You don't think I'm pretty? Well, here's a TROPHY to prove you wrong." And since then, the years have marched on with inexorable precision, so those trophies are essentially ways to prove NOW that I was once beautiful, even if others disagree or can't otherwise tell today.

But at 37, my self-esteem is no longer in the hands of others the way it once was at 23, so guess what? Out with the trophies, the tiara, the dresses, the sashes, etc. etc. I have my photos and my memories, and that is good enough for me. I felt SO GOOD to throw those silly things in the dumpster, positively lighter and brighter. Now, if I could just convince my HUSBAND to take this same approach...........

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