Friends are saying to me, “Have you moved yet?” And, I say, “kinda,” meaning that I keep taking stuff over to my new house but have not yet completed the task.
On November 11, 2016, I posted the foregoing on my Facebook page. Though I have tried my best to turn the pages back to that date in 2016, I wonder what it was I was thinking when I posted it. It definitely wasn’t significant enough for me to remember the WHY without going back to my Franklin Planner where I routinely detail the events of the day in writing, but this slow “move” to my new dwelling might appear to others as procrastination, but…in looking up the classic definition of procrastination, NOT SO.
As I contemplate the situation, I realize that even from grade school to high school to college, and then in my personal life, I ALWAYS had a FULL plate. Of course, that has always been my choice. Whether it was a term paper, a school project or anything else, I performed best at the eleventh hour. Similar to the characters in the Perry Mason mysteries by Erle Stanley Gardner, my favorite books to read in my youth, I did my very best work, or came up with the idea needed, or the task to be performed just minutes before deadline – just like Della Street and Paul Drake who provided Perry Mason the information to win his case for the client when all looked lost.
This is an EPIPHANY for me, providing great insight into this move and why it is taking so long. I have turned a corner in my life. I have wanted to downsize for quite some time, but there was no time to do it with me filling up every minute of every day with “something” to do. Since I arrived on the Mountain, I have been on numerous boards, participated in innumerable community activities and fundraisers for various organizations, and have loved every minute of it. In so doing, however, the seven day a week work life left personal things in my life undone. While others were cleaning house and taking a trip or doing things with their families, I said YES every time someone asked for my help, or in whatever job description I had for my career, had to jump over the goal post to do better than average – much better than average to validate my self-worth. I always did it, but it had a cost. So, today, I have not yet moved, but I have turned a corner and am taking some much needed time for me.
Each thing I pack, I truly apply the Feng Shui principles I have read about and learned to my life. I am taking a trip down memory lane. I have moved three other times on the Mountain – first from Fairway Park to Silver Lake Estates to White Mountain Lakes and then to Taylor. With each move I brought extra things with me from the Tobacco Program, the chamber of commerce job, radio and TV and then the newspaper. So many things were saved that had significance for me – memories of the jobs and people I worked and shared my life with. Now, I realize, in my new job, with three days off every week (something definitely foreign to me), I am now gifting myself the time I unconsciously denied myself since I arrived in the White Mountains in 1994. I am taking the time to look at each thing I have and deciding if I truly love it – if it is to go with me to the next chapter of my life or not. As I look at it, read it, or hold it, I am reminded of many things. I know that whatever we give up, we also have to grieve it, so I either intuitively know if it is still serving me or that it needs to be passed on to serve someone else.
My Mother had cancer for eight years and towards the end, living with my brother, she had my sister-in-law take her to the home where she still had things that had been important in her life. She went to get some business papers she had to have. She told me when she made that last trip there, she locked the door and turned to the home and said, “Thank you, house. That you for providing shelter to me and my family; thank you for all the good times and bad times I had there. I bless you and leave you for someone else.”
What an incredible insight to life she provided me by sharing that incident with me. In a sense, I am doing that. I am taking TIME, which I realize is one of our most valuable commodities, and thanking each thing that has served me in this home, and remembering its gift.
It is the month of Thanksgiving. Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you ever say is thank you, it’s enough.”
So, as I continued the task for evaluation of the things that have served me, including this wonderful home in Taylor, Arizona, I will be moved when I am moved…when I am through with the gift of gratitude for what has served me in this wonderful community of people whom I have come to love and appreciate.
The move is bitter-sweet, but a step in my evolutionary process which has guided me to the next chapter of my life.
Substituting some of my own words and paraphrasing those of Emily’s famous soliloquy from “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder, I say out loud as I embark on continuing my packing for my move (thank goodness not as a soul leaving the body, but as I let go):
“(Life) goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my (life in the White Mountains). But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye, Good-bye (house). Good-bye (Taylor)…Good-bye (things); Good-bye (memories of the 8 years in this neighborhood and the memories I have from living my life here)….Good-bye to clocks ticking….and (the beautiful roses I planted) and …sleeping and waking (up in this wonderful home.) Oh, earth (and Taylor), you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it–every, every minute?”
I do – and it is not procrastination, but truly allowing myself to “take time to feel the gratitude for the gift of my eight years in this home…as I pack, discard, and bless this home for the next person/family to enjoy its gift of shelter and memories.
barbarabruceradio 