It's The Little Things . . .

The long move-in takes up all the oxygen in the room. The hardest part is the lack of routine and schedule, including writing a weekly Substack. These past days I did what was right in front of me, and let schedule and routines fall away. Not easy for a Type-A personality who thrives on order and control.

In my fantasy of moving here, I had everything unpacked and put away in five days. I wrote for a couple of hours everyday and took long walks with the dog before I began sorting through boxes and bins. Reality, however, looks like an aching back, a much slower pace to getting it all done, a tremendous amount of dust and permission. The permission needed to be unpacked too. It says “Please be kind to yourself; take a nap; the world will not stop spinning if you don’t get everything put away today.”

Small projects keep popping up and shifting my focus into the future. Getting settled is beckoning from a distance I wish were closer. Isn’t that the way it goes when we are dealing with an overwhelming task? There is some kind of hopeful promise just around the next curve; we can feel it, but it hasn’t come into focus yet. The past days are a blur of sorting, placement, and cleaning, the foundation for creating this third act home.

A few mornings of journaling at the kitchen table, looking out at the garden I managed to create before our furniture arrived, brought me joy. Maybe it’s recognizing the little things brings the most joy, not the big thing of unpacking every last item before some sort of self-imposed deadline. I got in the first longer walk with my dog Mickey yesterday morning. The park up the street from us is shaded by Redwoods and singing with life – children playing, a dad having a catch with their kid, dogs whose tails wag furiously when they meet. . . a reminder that life goes on outside of the realm of moving into a new home.

Weariness comes and goes. Yesterday, I had a helper and between the two of us, we got most of the boxes unpacked, save for the books. There’s never enough space for my books and it’s been a habit of mine to add floor to ceiling shelving wherever I’ve lived.

As the work in and around the house dwindles to “doable,” the gift of seeing the little things lights me up. Unpacking my tea kettle was one of those. The tea kettle is part of my morning ritual. Tea and a notebook. Little things make up a big life. Kind neighbors, and there are plenty of those here, green space, plenty of that too, and a house that this morning will have to wait for my attention, because I’m going to take the dog up to the park and say hello to my our new Redwood friends. After all, I have permission.

What are the little things that light you up and keep you going? Let’s have a conversation.