Day 41: Home is All I Need
Picking up your whole life and moving it to a new continent shakes you up a bit.
I suppose I should own it and say it shook (is shaking?) me up a bit. I live with well-managed anxiety (thank you, yoga & meds) and have for most of my life, so feeling anxious is a familiar constant. When the world around me offers up external sources of anxiety (Covid, for example, or this move) I get/need to flex my anti-anxiety muscles a bit extra.
We have lived in a state of perpetual temporariness for the better part of this year. The idea to move came up at the very end of December as we begrudgingly left Paris to return home. The potential reality of moving started to form in January and so did the prep and planning. Work on our house started in February, as did purging all the THINGS we’d accumulated over the years. By March we made our first big switch — Spain instead of France — and shifted into high gear. We shared the news with the “public” (aka posted it on FB) on our 30th Oscar Anniversary (March 28th this year, the closest it’s been to the actual date in years) and started our long process of saying goodbye to the people, places, and things. We moved out of our home and into the Launch Pad on June 1st. We left for Spain on August 20th. We moved into the Hobbit House on August 21st. We moved into the Awesome Flat on September 22nd.
Yesterday, Day 41, felt different. Beyond our delicious walk down to the water in the morning I didn’t go anywhere. (Video: Here for the Waves)
So what did I do? I’ve had a cart open and filled at the Spanish Ikea site for over a week. I started it before we actually moved into the Awesome Flat based on what we learned at our walk-through/lease signing date. Now, the apartment is fully furnished complete with linens so we didn’t need to hurry, or, honestly, *need* to buy anything but after 9 months of temporariness and getting rid of almost everything we owned, I needed to buy some things for the flat that were *ours*.
And yet hitting “buy” was incredibly hard.
I hemmed and hawed over which items were “right” and “really needed.” I stressed about the idea of adding things to our possessions that wouldn’t fit in our luggage. I struggled with the persistent impermanence of renting vs owning and what that meant for any “stuff” we might add.
I sat on our couch all day yesterday, battled my anxiety demons, and won.
And then?
Home was all I needed yesterday. We had a lovely Shabbat dinner with proper candles instead of tea lights. We (finally) used our portable speaker for our dinner music instead of just listening from our phones. We had friends over and sat up talking until 3:30.
Things feel more permanent now.
