Moving: Facing the Moment of Truth

Something about moving forces you to confront your true habits. Although moving is largely a huge pain, it provides valuable opportunities for insights. And honest conversations with yourself.

Every time I move I’m always curious to see if I:

• kept up with my “to-do” projects
• adequately deep cleaned behind and under the furniture often enough
• managed to stay on top of the purging

When I mentioned to one of my friends I would be moving she immediately said, “Get rid of all your stuff. Throw it out.” I haven’t done that, yet, but it is tempting. I’m packing boxes with stuff that I haven’t seen, or used, in a long time.

To be fair, this past year has mostly been spent socially distanced and with my immediate family. Or attending the rare outdoor event. In other words, I haven’t had many opportunities to use a lot of things I would in a non-pandemic year. For example, this summer I wasn’t able to kayak. Hence, my paddling gear remained in the closet getting dusty.

You might think with so much time spent home I would have tackled ambitious and lingering to-do projects. Or purged routinely. Or deep cleaned often. The reality is, none of those things happened. Somehow I was very busy trying to rearrange my life to the “new” normal of online everything. Or how to get things done remotely. It might seem like that would be faster and easier, but in some cases it wasn’t. (Read more here.)

Another unforeseen challenge arose with routine purging. Being inside so much I was itching to go through my closets and cupboards. However, pandemic shutdowns meant few options existed for disposing of unwanted items. I didn’t want to generate bags of donations and then leave them laying around taking up space. Donation bins were closed for months in the early days of the pandemic.

Fortunately, donation bins have remained open during this second wave of lockdowns. However, I have bags of specialized recycling (i.e., cosmetic tubes, makeup containers, ripped clothing etc.) accepted only by certain stores. Now these particular stores are only open for pick-ups or delivery, definitely not for specialized recycling.

Do I move the specialized recycling and wait until I can properly dispose of it? Or abandon my standards and send it the landfill?

As for the deep cleaning, it didn’t happen often. In my mind, this accompanies routine purging.