The sun doesn’t sink and rise, it’s our own revolution that brings dark and light.
Stillness is a nice idea, though. An idea I don’t want to live without, even as we plan our move to Alaska. Weeks after returning from Alaska.
Moving is a lot of work mostly because of all the stuff we’ve accumulated. There’s the paperwork too, but we’re still in stuff sorting mode. Three truckloads of stuff to the thrift store, the scrapyard, and the dump, and I’m still overwhelmed by what we need to physically move out of our house. But I’m finding peace in the dream of permanently paring down, so that moving won’t be as daunting when we do it again. Maybe our next move will feel more like traveling.
The essentials fit easily into our car: Mariah, our two kids, our dog, and me. It’s wasteful to want much more, but I’ve hung on to so much stuff because I didn’t want it to go to waste. I’d think, No one else would want this, but I could use it. But the simplest way to not waste is to not get the stuff in the first place.
I feel good when I look at it that way, at who I’ll be the next time we move. Someone who has fewer things and more useful skills.
That’s the bright side.
I know the downside is still there, and I can sense it just outside the edge of my vision. Waste, worry, and regret are ideas bogged down in the past and future, never now, rarely right in front of us. I used to say I wanted to slow down, but that was a lie. I just want to be content, wherever I am, even while I’m almost always on my way to somewhere else.
That’s getting easier, even as my life gets irreversibly more complicated.
Maybe that’s growing up. A few years ago, what could have been utter simplicity felt like a void. Compelled to have a full life, I pursued sport after sport, high after high, all of which required purchasing and consuming thing after thing. But there’s fulfillment and there’s frivolity. There’s having depth and there’s going off the deep end.
When I see people like my past self, I think, Get a life, in the best possible way. Because I doubt I’d be where I am if I hadn’t been there. Or even if I was, I wouldn’t appreciate it.
You can’t have the highs without the lows, and the definition of dark is the absence of light. We’re all somewhere in between. The only place it’s possible to be stuck is at the center of everything.