Packing and unpacking: The real reason people dread moving
Published
We have friends who loved going out at least once a month to look at houses for sale. They had been doing that activity for years.
Though they had fallen in love with several houses, they had never made an offer on any of them. The reason: they were terrified of moving!
Believe it or not, they were not unusual. Many normal, well-adjusted folks suffer from moving anxiety. It isn’t actually the moving part; it’s the packing and the unpacking.
Everyone knows packing up your “stuff” is a pain. We have had fleeting thoughts about selling our house and buying a bigger place. We haven’t been getting along with our current house for a while and would really like to find a more compatible house. That’s when the thought of packing up this place and then having to unpack at the new place slows down our interest. We aren’t sure we can deal with all that moving stuff again.
We have gotten older, but when we were younger, we moved easily. Of course, in those younger years, we had much less to pack. Actually, we only had a Volkswagen the first time we moved. Can't pack much in one of those little cars.
Becoming parents and homeowners automatically changed that. Babes and houses are consummate consumers, and our pile of possessions multiplied prodigiously. From that point on, moving was an ordeal to be dreaded. We packed over 30 boxes to move from our first to our second house. The number of boxes doubled for our next move. We stopped counting when we moved again.
Some of those boxes are still with us, living in the attic, covered with a blanket of dust, unpacked and mysterious. A few of them, labeled “important stuff,” belong to our grown children. The children moved out; the boxes stayed.
We got curious once and opened one of those old boxes. Inside, we found pictures of people we couldn’t identify, a slotted spoon, 10 feet of coiled rope, a dry snake skin and several textbooks from schools we never attended. That took care of our curiosity.
Those boxes weren’t ours. They couldn’t be. Anyone who’d save stuff like that would be totally crazy!
Laura Moore can be emailed at lehmoore1@gmail.com.
