ON THE MOVE MOVING COMPANY
  • Home
    • About Us
  • IKEA DELIVERY
  • Blog
  • Storage Facility
  • Moving Supplies
  • Advice Before the Move
  • Contact
  • Testimonials
  • Moving Stories
  • Music!
  • Media
  • Cancelation Policy
  • אודות
  • דף הבית

Moving Stories

As part of our community blog content at ON THE MOVE, we present our interview ​series, where we invite movers to bring their thoughts not only on the physical move but on the intensely personal experience of moving house. Here we explore the spirituality and psychology of Home and why where we live means so much to us. We want to hear your story, please share it with us.​
Submit Story

The Trials of Moving House

1/18/2016

Comments

 
by Kevin Fong
Picture
So I just moved house. My life is in a sea of poorly labelled cardboard boxes filled with random contents. Everything is packed that way. From clothes and camping gear to hard drives and reprints. I’ve done pretty well to find the box that contained this laptop. Less well in locating the power cord that goes with it, so forgive the haste with which this has to be written.

Moving house is an understudied phenomenon worthy of more academic analysis. It has occurred to me that the three packaging symbols that adorn the side of every single box – the umbrella, the “This Way Up” arrow and the picture of the broken glass – probably have a more ancient origin and purpose. I bet that if archaeologists had a really good dig around they’d find them on the walls of our most primitive prehistoric dwellings. They are, I suspect, a primordial, perennially unheeded warning that translates roughly to: “Don’t Leave the Cave You Idiot. There’s Nothing Wrong With The House You Live In Now.”

Psychologists tell us that moving house is among the most stressful life events a person might ever have to endure. I remember wondering how that could be so. Surely, I thought, it is only a scaled-up version of that trick you used to pull off as an undergraduate at the end of term, when the accumulated detritus of 12 weeks of student living had to magically disappear into bin liners that got shoved into the boot of your dad’s car.

There must be a mathematical expression for the state of entropy that describes the way your house looks after you’ve just moved in.

That was the strategy I operated. One that left me on the eve of our move gazing with Zen-like calm at the contents of my old house, with no clue how they might disappear into the removals lorry but knowing that somehow they would. For once, my student existence appeared to have prepared me for this life event. I had seen this movie several times before, and it always had a happy ending. Unfortunately, I had mixed up my movie genres; I’d done the equivalent of mistaking Black Hawk Down for a slightly scaled-up version of Watership Down.

There must be a mathematical expression for the state of entropy that describes the way your house looks after you’ve just moved in. One that defines the lowest state of order that your life can adopt. That is the state I have reached. Admittedly, I didn’t start from a particularly high level of organisation. Let’s say that the Dewey decimal system and my home office library were not well acquainted. But I used to know where things were, at least.

I did invest a little time trying to superimpose some structure ahead of the move. I sat for the best part of a day, in the room that doubled as my home office, trying to get it straightened out. I failed miserably.
​

It’s safe to say that if you haven’t read a particular book or a paper in the past 10 years, then the probability that you’re going to read it in the next 10 is at best marginal. There are shelves of that stuff at home that surely should have gone into the recycling box. Only none of it did.
Picture
I did stop briefly to ask myself what I was hoping to achieve with all that accumulated academic material. Perhaps in the recesses of my mind I imagined that if, at the end of the world, the British Library should fail to survive then perhaps folks might have a go at restarting civilisation from the contents of my shelves. No doubt it would be an abbreviated and slightly odd version of civilisation, with the works of Isaac Asimov providing the central dogma for all organised religion and with the entire canon of classical music being replaced by my dusty Thompson Twins Greatest Hits CD.

And then the penny dropped. This was no longer a home library. I have a laptop and hard drive for that. This had become the museum of my life. Not a great museum (definitely go to the V&A and the Science Museum first before coming here) but nevertheless a place where artifacts of significance were being kept for posterity. There was stuff in there that I could no more throw away than the curator at the Natural History Museum could junk the skeleton of Dippy the Diplodocus for taking up so much space in its reception hall.

I was, I suddenly realised, standing in the Museum of Natural Kev, a venue in which disorder was the central exhibit. Calm descended. When the removals guy came to stick the contents of the shelves into random boxes, I reassured myself that when they finally emerged to fill the shelves in my new house, no matter how randomly they came out, or in what order, they would look pretty much the same as they had done before they went in.

In retrospect, it would have been better if I hadn’t applied that philosophy to my entire house, but you live and learn. And it’s kind of exciting really. Embracing the anarchy has been good for me. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, I never know from day to day what I’m going to get. And that is surprisingly OK.
​

You’ll have to excuse me at this point – I’m on deadline and I need to file this column before the battery runs out. Now, where the hell did I put the broadband router?

Call for Moving Stories submissions. Our readers want to share in your move!
​
​onthemovejerusalem@gmail.com

Comments

    Interviews and Culture Page

    Here we share the (moving) moving stories of our fabulous clients, plus tidbits of information on Jewish culture and community to make your reading experience unforgettably enjoyable. 

    Our interest here is to explore the material that makes up the word "home" and what it means to all of us.
    ​
    ​Join us for monthly updates by subscribing below to our monthly newsletter.

    ​We respect your privacy and will never ever spam your e-mail inbox, no way, no how...


    Tweets by @onthemeuve



    Archives

    April 2017
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    December 2014

    RSS Feed

    Blog Directory & Business Pages - OnToplist.com
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos used under Creative Commons from Ladycliff, fernando butcher, Sebastiaan ter Burg, Damian Gadal, Alex Mueller's Daily Photo, torbakhopper, wideeyedwonders, Israel_photo_gallery, Bytemarks, symphony of love, Mr Moss, angelocesare
  • Home
    • About Us
  • IKEA DELIVERY
  • Blog
  • Storage Facility
  • Moving Supplies
  • Advice Before the Move
  • Contact
  • Testimonials
  • Moving Stories
  • Music!
  • Media
  • Cancelation Policy
  • אודות
  • דף הבית