Hopefully the Last Post About Packing, Ever

I am DOG tired. Dog tired as in--I want to lay on my kitchen floor with my legs curled under me and my head on the floor and fall asleep in the sunshine.

This move has been wrecking me. In the past, Jon and I get all macho-tough-guy about moving and we're like, "We're going to ROCK this packing!" We get prideful, like packing snobs, because we think we are so good at packing. We have phases, systems, detailed labeling of boxes. And we're fast. We make the boxes our biatch, yo.

Not this time. This time I'm a sniveling little baby, who half the time is living in denial that packing is even an activity to do, and the other half I'm blatantly procrastinating by checking facebook 100 times a day and overdosing on TV in the evenings. I've been in some existential crisis over this moment in our lives. I won't go into it all, because I'd rather be laying on the floor, but for a while I was stumped about why I felt so crazy about this move. Stumped because we have really wanted this move to happen. Selling our house is good for so many reasons. Yes, packing and moving stinks for anyone, but still, why the existential crazy-crisis? I think I've figured it out.

I had been working so hard to order my life to make room for art and writing, yet still play with my family and friends, all while having a clean house. I was fighting for it, and succeeding sometimes. To me, it was all about order, and packing up a house to move to a yet-to-be-discovered location, screamed loudly in my ears, disorder. I'm afraid our fuzzy future and chaos is going to steal my creativity and my time to invest into that part of myself.

Somehow, just by recognizing this fear, I've been able to release it a bit. I have to stop being so dependent on order and comfort and predictability. I guess I thought I had a handle on that because of the nature of Jon's work, but apparently I'm not at the master level of openness yet. My friend Michele reminded me of Ann Voskamp's physical motion that helps in the act of letting go. Clenched fist, opening and releasing that which we hold tightly. I may or may not have paced around my house doing this over and over. Okay, yes I did. While deep-breathing like a bulldog. :)

Now I'm going back downstairs to finish packing the kitchen. I'm still going to keep my labeling system:

All-caps in the upper left hand corner of the box. KITCHEN.
Listed below it in small-caps, all the contents in the box.

Don't make me let go of that!


***Bulldog Illustration