Moving Stress = Goodness

Moving is stressful.

If I try to think about what makes it stressful, I feel hard-pressed to define it. Maybe it's all the decision making? The convincing stores to sell you things? The getting things to fit? The physical process of packing/moving/unpacking? I don't know. I do know that my stress level feels very heightened at the moment.

I'd like to try to put into words some thoughts about this particular move.

In September of 2004, I started this blog with a post about how I am "never home" but always packing the suitcase. At that time, I was about to move to Turkey. Since then, I've moved upteen more times. I spent 27 months living out of a suitcase. And now, at the wonderful age of 36, I am finally, finally, settling into a home that I hope will be home for a long while. This move has a sentimental feeling of fulfillment, of getting to "nest" after long last, of arrival that my heart has needed probably since childhood.

As one who has moved my whole life, there's almost a feeling of I need this. Many who know me well know that I need it. I am doing my very best to embrace it, enjoy it, soak it up. Most days I succeed.

While I was very much looking forward to my new place, a few weeks before the time to make the transition from the old apartment to the new, I went through a mood: I just couldn't face packing up everything into boxes and trunks and suitcases again. It feels like I just unpacked them. Something about packing them up symbolized something from all the past moves and all the unsettledness of my life that I wasn't ready to face again.

I wrote my boss to ask how our company was going to handle moving me, and it turns out that there isn't enough money to justify hiring movers to load up my stuff (especially since I don't have furniture or appliances) to move me across town. I was (am) totally okay with that response and have found great joy in moving my things myself.

My mom wrote and asked me how I am moving my things and I explained that I load up a shopping cart, roll it down the hill, hop on the bus, ride it across town, and then walk about 2 minutes to my new building, where I can load the cart into the itty bitty elevator, and ride up to my apartment. I then unload the cart, and hop back on the bus to go back home and start the process all over again.

She was imagining an American style grocery store cart, and not a French shopping cart, and I realized that I've never introduced this every-week necessity of my life to the blog. While it is not past me to hijack a real grocery cart and wheel it into my building and my apartment and even name it, that is not what is going on with the shopping cart.

This is a shopping cart.

And my main method of moving my things across town. Being a single female without a car who, by order of the chiropractor, is not allowed to lift or carry anything heavy, it seems about the only way to move my things across town. I've already done the living room (including all my books), the guest bedroom, the bathroom, and started onto the bedroom in a period of 2.5 weeks by using this guy. The camelridingcowgirl stated it well when she said that I'm not moving, I'm just shifting. The cart is helping me to feel like I am just shifting from one place to next instead of full-out moving.

Another thing that has come up during this wonderful time of "nesting" is a full-on confrontation with my singleness. I never planned on being single at 36, and I never imagined that when I finally moved into my first real permanent home, that I'd be doing so single. A home with just me in it doesn't feel quite like a home. A third-culture kid learns that "home is where family is" no matter where that may be. So a part of me doesn't quite feel at home in an empty house. Add to that making major decisions (apartment, appliances, furniture) on my own, with my limited wisdom...can be overwhelming. Then tack on doing things that are outside of my comfort zone or that I just don't even know how to do or am physically incapable of doing. The Bible is so right and wise when it says in Ecclesiastes that "two are better than one." I have felt that these last few weeks, physically and emotionally.

Then, during my first week of "shifting," I received one of those phone calls at 3am that you know before answering cannot be good news. Someone died. It's hard for me to find words to define the person and their role in my life. I can't quite say a family member, and I can't quite say someone important or major in my life. Yet this person's death is significant and enough so that I need(ed) some time to process it.

I needed to be alone and I needed to not be alone. I needed to think and I needed to be distracted. I needed a mindless task to focus on that used no mental energy at all. Shifting my things by way of a grocery cart on a bus may seem like the most illogical way to move apartments, but it is exactly what I needed this month.

Thus, my emotions are all over the place. I have extreme highs of excitement over something as simple as buying a bed. My eyes well up with tears on the spot when something turns difficult, like buying a fridge. I have felt lonely and oh-so-grateful for my friends. I put on a happy face and play games and laugh and snap in anger and frustration at the drop of a hat at small things because inside my head and heart are reeling over much bigger things.

I'm trying to keep an eternal perspective of God's glory in the midst of all this very trivial non-eternal life I'm living right now. Does what oven I purchase matter in God's great scheme of things? Not at all. Thus, no need to stress over it. Can I honor God in which oven I purchase? Totally. And thus, something to try to be wise about. I feel alone and yet have been reminded daily that I am not alone. Never alone. He is always with me. Someone died and there is a human emotion called grief that is real and yet we do not grieve as those who have no hope. I have hope. And thus, my grieving looks different.

My moving looks different. My life looks different.

While all of that may be stressful at the moment, it's also good. Because He is good to me.