Following up on my previous episode discussing the big move that we recently made to a new living space and a new office space, splitting functions we previously did in our loft apartment in the downtown of Milwaukee, I gave some thought to a problem related to and revealed by the move that my wife and I have given a good bit of thought to.
We have moved several times now. When you move, you pack stuff up. For us, that generally means putting stuff either into plastic storage tubs or (what I prefer) into bankers boxes. That’s not a problem at all. It’s nice to have the things one is moving organized like that.
The problem that was driven home to me by our recent move was that after the move 9 years ago, quite a few of those boxes and storage tubs that came from our previous home in Kingston, NY went into our walk-in storage closet, and then, in that entire 9 years, they never got unpacked. In fact, we recently moved each of those without unpacking them, nearly all of them going into a third destination for our move, a sizable storage locker. And there they sit right now, where they will sit, until we decide to do something different and finally unpack and go through all of that stuff.
I realized that I’ve been doing that in a more specific way going back not just to the last two moves, but for decades, all the way back to graduate school. In may case, it is notebooks and photocopied articles that I have saved, stored, and brought from place to place, reluctant to let them go, just in case down the line they might prove useful, important, insightful, even necessary for my work down the line.
It’s worth thinking about the motivation(s) that leads otherwise reasonable people to hold onto things they’ve packed, never getting around to unpacking them, sorting through them, and that’s what I reflect upon a bit in this podcast episode. There’s a good bit more to think through and say, but this is where I’ll leave off in these reflections for the moment.
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