I will soon be packing up my life and taking it across the world… Again. And I suppose that after I knew that this decision would be made, I pretty much put a freeze on acquiring anything. A temporary house remains far less full. My friend Cory used to say, “Home is where the stuff is.” But few of us are as Buddhist as we should be and we still have attachments to material things and emotional hangings.
Things Lost in 2008.
- A key to a bike lock.
- An expensive pen. It isn’t the first time I’ve lost it. The first time I lost it, I said it was my grandfather’s pen so that people wouldn’t think I was stupid for buying and then losing an expensive pen.
- My belt buckle with the name of my hometown.
- Many pictures taken and half a story in a computer crash.
- My wanderlust.
- My job as a cleaning lady.
- My ability and desire to do it all her way.
- My interest in explaining things.
- The desire to do much more than have endless Sunday afternoons.
- One of the chairs in the teahaus. I still don’t know where that went.
- Two books I lent out. (I kept three of other’s though. Sorry Matt, Agnes and Sophie.) The good ones never come back.
- Most of my grass-is-greener mentality.
When I made this list last year, I had a whole slew of things that were stolen from a rented car when my parents and I parked outside a medieval city in the south of France. I remember swearing then that I would no longer fret over things (except for my computer, but I suppose that this thing processes more of myself than past lovers have.) But of course, I scrambled around swearing when I lost that pen. Yet looking at this list now, and last year’s as well, they both quickly become positive. Things lost becomes Things of which I’ve rid myself.
What’s your list? What’s making moving across the world just a little easier?
