5 Ways to Stay Positive During a Move

Although I hate moving, there are a lot of positives that emerge during the process, and they aren't just the simple pleasures of de-cluttering.
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I'm moving in exactly one week. And so I'm pretty single-minded right now. When I'm not actually doing something connected to the move, I'm thinking about the move.

I've fessed up before to just how very much I hate moving. (Some would say irrationally so. I name no names.) But I'm also trying to take my own advice from last week's volcanic ash crisis and remind myself that "Ce n'est pas gràve."

And it really isn't all that "gràve." In fact, there are a lot of positives that emerge when you move house and they aren't just the simple pleasures of decluttering.

In that spirit, here are five ways to stay upbeat during a move:

1. Reconnect with your kids' childhood. One of Gretchen Rubin's four splendid truths is that "The days are long but the years are short." She employs this principle to capture what it's like to be a parent: how those long, seemingly endless days of reading Good Night, Moon and potty-training dissolve - overnight - into adolescence. Her point is that you really need to savor your kids' childhood while it lasts because while it may feel long in the day to day, it's actually fleeting. (I had this same realization last year while re-reading Peter Pan with my daughter.)

Moving helps you to savor their childhood. Because of the many things you unearth as you re-open those frightening storage containers that you hid in the depths of your closet when you first moved in are the myriad art projects, report cards, essays and birthday cards that your kids have done over the years. My own favorite was a picture that my son drew when his (quite progressive) nursery school did a unit on Martin Luther King. I'd forgotten all about this picture, which used to hang above the desk in my old office. It depicts a sort of Monsters, Inc.-style version of MLK addressing an audience with a disproportionately large microphone while saying "I hope that one day Black people and White people can be friends." Priceless.

2. Reconnect with your own past. You may not have any kids. But you'll still be forced to take a trip down memory lane as you yank stuff out of those dusty old cupboards. I found a pair of my father's orthopedic shoes. He left them here on his last visit to London in October of 2008. We saved them so that we could give them back to him on his next visit. But he never came back. He died, suddenly, of a heart attack in March, 2009. Back when he was alive, I hated those shoes. They were large and clunky and a visible reminder that the body of a man who used to take jump shots in our driveway well into his 50s was slowly giving out on him. (It ended up giving out on him much more quickly than we expected.) But seeing those shoes again actually made me happy. They were a tangible reminder of his presence in our lives. And I needed that.

3. Allow yourself to let go of the *shoulds*. I've written before about how many of us go through life tethered to an endless list of things that we feel we ought to be doing, yet never quite manage to accomplish: making photo albums, reading the Bible, joining a gym. During the course of going through my files the other day, I came across some notes from a Hebrew class that I took while pregnant with my son and which I've schlepped around with me for (gulp) ten years. The thought was that some day I'd get my act together and really learn Hebrew. Well folks, I still haven't let go of the goal of figuring out my relationship to Judaism. But I think that I've finally acknowledged to myself that despite my best intentions, that process will not entail learning Hebrew (a least for the foreseeable future.) Toss. Ditto my hopes of ever actually using that over-sized fish poacher that we got for our wedding. After twelve years doing noble service as a de facto spice rack, I think it's finally time for me to dispatch that particular item from our lives. Phew.

4. Imagine new vistas literally and figuratively. One of the most exciting things about moving is that it offers the prospect of a whole new neighborhood to discover. There will be new cafés, new book stores, new dry cleaners - not to mention new neighbors! I love change so imagining these things is always a way to motivate myself when I just don't feel like calling the Gas company to request new service or whatever arduous task lies at hand. It's a bit like singing My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music, if you'll forgive the cheesy musical analogy. And change in one's physical scenery can also furnish a new take on life psychologically. Out with the old and in with the new, and all that good stuff. I really believe that.

5. Trust that things will be better once you make it to the other side. Like childbirth, if you really remembered all the gory details, you'd never move more than once in your life. And yet, most of us do it several times. So, yes, moving is painful but it also does come to an end. And when the clouds part, there's a whole new world to explore.

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