un/packing

We're getting rather close to the week during which student populations and often the recently unencumbered pack up and relocate for the next 8 to 12 months.

Though I managed to largely avoid this bad habit during my academic misadventures, I am no stranger to the ordeal of moving house; and this year I'm doing it for the second time. You see, I've been "summering" on William Street (perhaps the worst place to do such a thing given the perpetual construction at William and Park) and at the end of month will be shifting a few blocks over to Allen. It's not a big move, but it is significant.

Life does some things that many of us would probably rather avoid. I'm no exception. I wish I weren't moving; and not just because I'm lazy. Nor is it that the new place is trading down, or that I'm particularly attached the current dwelling. The (dis)organizing, the cheque-writing, the losing-of-things, the breaking-of-things, the changing of rhythms, setting up hydro/internet/water/gas accounts, changes of address (yeah right), the ushering in of new eras... all these things bear far too much symbolic significance for me to handle very well.

I think one of the symptoms of the quarter life crisis is an apathy towards upheaval. But that malaise is a symptom of our generations' over-exposure to events which dramatically alter the roles in which we percieve ourselves and those of the people in our lives. Marriages, divorces, deaths, births, construction, relocations, career changes, rejections, broken refrigerators... all of these things should bear some symbolic significance but are far too common and omni-present in our culture to hold the kind of meaning that would help us adjust to life afterward. In anthro-speak: we are perpetual initiands and forever hold an Other within us, never truly completing the rites of passage that we aren't even aware we participate in because, well, that's just life.

Instead it seems as though most of us simply carry on as though either a) nothing really changed, or b) the change doesn't really matter.

Well, I'll tell you: change matters. It matters to individuals and it matters to whole groups. The rate of change, though, has accelerated to the point where we're inundated with it and coping properly requires so much energy and attention that many of us exist in a state of constant anxiety.

So here's what I'm going to do. When I get back from a wedding in Grand Prairie (an event which makes moving that weekend extremely impossible) and I'm unpacking the material possessions that represent my culture of one I intend to just slow down and do it with the kind of attention that I need to give it in order to internalise my new digs. Wish me luck. Or bring me some bread and salt.