Ch-ch-ch-changes

This isn't a blog post with a point.  I'm sitting with a cup of tea, full of tired, and wistful feelings of strangeness.  In an hour or two the packers arrive from our other apartment where at this moment they are repacking our boxes ready to ship to Australia. These boxes have sat in that little heat box of a studio apartment, partly unpacked and unloved, waiting for the next big thing.  Some of them were shipped from Perth Australia, to Los Angeles, then stored, then shipped again from LA to India and stored, and then once more from India to Thailand.  Now here they go again.  


I'm not proud of it.  It really sums up the lessons I've learned and the journey I've taken. Once I was a hoarder of western proportions. I went from being pretty poor to having lots of money and buying things I loved - books and paintings, wood carvings, cds and dvds.  But since I have been in the uneasy position of not being able to find a place in the world that is safe and stable for Gagan and I to be, all those pretty things are in boxes and their memory has faded. I've realised that I don't remotely need them in my life to be happy.  Well, I will give one caveat to that - the books would be the one thing I would enjoy having around my home. To cast my eyes along a well stocked shelf, to run my finger along the spines and pull out a random book to read over a hot drink in the afternoon would make life more precious.  But that is truly the only thing.  Though everything else is lovely, and has meaning in its own way - I can honestly say that if I had a photo of them, I could enjoy them as much with a glance once in a while. That says a lot I think.  

It has cost a huge amount of money lugging these things around the world.  By the time I realised I should unload and simplify my life a huge amount, I wasn't in a place that I could do that. So here we go again - spending much of the last of our savings to haul it across the oceans again. But this time - we'll find homes for things at the other end. In Australia there will be second-hand stores and places to donate loved things, so that other people can love them as well.  What a lesson to learn. 

And meanwhile I am sitting with that very surreal feeling I always get in the midst of a move.  Circling the globe is never a 'normal' thing to do.  And now I am finding myself almost back where I was 16 years ago, yet I am not remotely the same person, and the country I fled from has now become one that I see as saving us.  How we do grow up when we learn how lucky we are!

I don't like moving and moving and moving. I've done it enough now to know that I just don't remember things very well. Each place that is so real in a moment, becomes a vague and distant memory way too quickly for my liking.  I'm sitting in this living room in this very nice apartment here in Bangkok. This room was almost prison like at times as I was confined to the house because of my health, but it's where my learning epiphany took place so I feel very fond of it, and to know that soon I won't be able to picture it very well seems a little sad.  But perhaps it's all about living in the moment - learning to enjoy the 'experience self' more than the 'remembering self'.   I'll sign off from Thailand with this interesting TED talk.  I'll write again soon - I have drinkable tap water, fresh air, recycling, and the Southern Cross constellation in my sights.

5 comments:

  M

5/14/10, 3:08 AM

Oh! The Southern Cross. I miss that.

  Joe Piechura

5/14/10, 11:34 AM

Haha, leaving home has made me realise how much crap I own. I want to bring my DVD collection abroad, without cases, and found out it weights a pretty hefty 5kg. That's a quarter of my baggage allowance on the plane.

  jude

5/14/10, 11:53 AM

Thanks for reading my blog! :) You know what we do? have all the movies on a hard drive that you bring on the plane... if you have a laptop you can watch them that way. 1TB disc can hold a shite load of movies :) Your music can come along too!

  Anonymous

5/29/10, 5:49 PM

How did the move go?

G

  spajadigit

6/3/10, 4:06 AM

I felt the same way you do about books until I got my kindle. Don't get me wrong, I still love *certain* books- the ones with art from things I love like pin ups from the fifties, movies, theme parks... But as the iPod did for music, as the iPad is doing for movies, so the kindle did for books.

I used to hoard as well. I carried ten boxes of stuff with me for nearly twelve years from one apartment to another, and as the years went on, I rarely even opened them any more.

Teresa gave me a rule. If I haven't looked at it or played with it or turned it on for a year, it goes in the trash. That simplified our life. Heh.

The only thing I can't agree on is the art on the walls. If I had to move to a smaller place I would actually pay to store them so that someday, if I had the space again, I would hang them up. Pictures don't have the texture or the nesting quality that art and sconces have.

I hope your move is successful and puts you where you want to be. Good luck!

 


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