moving time

A little backstory: I grew up in several different homes; my first was a single-wide trailer that had been added to with a ramshackle two bedroom/living room addition, thus creating a hybridized living situation whose full strangeness I did not appreciate for years. The second was a much classier double-wide trailer where I had a big bedroom, as well as a family den and fireplace (movin’ on up, as they say). After my parents’ divorce, there was a crowded house where I shared a room with my brother, then a small house on a major highway (literally, our driveway led to the highway) where I had a tiny, tiny room. Then another double-wide, which, if you know me, is the one that burned down while I was a junior at the College of Charleston. Then came our current, much classier double-wide. Personally, I’ve lived in Buist, a freshman dorm where I had two roommates and a hall bath; then came Rutledge for two years, where I lived with one other guy, in what amounted to an on campus apartment with an actual kitchen!! For the last two years, I’ve lived West of the Ashley in a nice two bedroom two-story townhouse. I didn’t realize it until I was moving during the last week, but I had become rather attached to that cheap townhouse.

Packing up all my books, all of my odds and ends, computer parts and shoes and shelves, I became quite sad; it wasn’t just that I was leaving, it was something more, something that I can’t put my finger on. Partly, I honestly think, it was packing up my books. I have many. Many many. And I’m constitutionally unable to throw them away. Boxes and boxes of books, taken to storage or to my new apartment. Partly I think it was the impending drastic change in behavior; for the last two years, I have ridden the bus every day, twice a day, for two hours, almost every day except Sunday. While it will be very nice to not have to get up that extra hour early, it feels strange already.

Mostly though, i think it was the memories, and not even the memories that are necessarily tied to the place itself. It’s instead a feeling of passing, of moving on to something else, of growing up and yet going nowhere, of becoming established in another place without setting down any roots. In fact, I seem to be losing my connections everywhere, some a long time ago and some today and yesterday. Some are going to be pruned tomorrow, I already know. And all of that is folded into the feeling that I want to settle down, I want to know what I’m doing and where I’m going, and with whom. But many of the whos are missing in action, the wheres are uncertain, and the whats are swirling around in a maelstrom inside my head and heart. So everything is changing, yet nothing feels different, in this in between moment I’m trying to find out who I am while the people and things that made me who I was yesterday seem to be drifting away. It’s exhilarating. It’s incredibly frightening. Navigating between those two extremes is becoming tiring. Also, moving forced me to realize that I have entirely too many things. Not in a complaining sort of way, but in a larger spiritual sort of way. As in I’m too attached to all of my things, and I think that they give me security, the books and little things I know so well. I knew that was an illusion, but now I know that it’s foolish–which are two different things.

Things to Do:

1. Liberate myself from earthly possessions. After all, nobody who seems like they know what they’re talking about says “Go forth and accumulate things, and thou shalt be happy!” Rather the opposite; think of the man who questioned Christ about how to get into heaven and the eye of the needle. Buddhism asserts that man’s (gender inclusive, of course) attachment to possessions ties us to dis-ease, to samsara and the eternal cycle of rebirth. Islam demands a religious tax on material wealth. You see the problem.

2. Work on 1.