Ay, ay, ay! We're finally in Hong Kong, though I wouldn't say we're settled yet at all. It does feel good not to be packing and sorting and disposing of personal effects, which has consumed most of the last three weeks. Moving is very definitely hell, and this one certainly lived up to that reputation. Oftentimes with moves you get to a point where you stuff things into garbage bags and move things willy-nilly from the old place to the new. When moving countries this clearly is not an option. Whatever you move has to be detailed obsessively for the purposes of customs, and moved at great expense even so, which tends to focus the mind about what really needs to be brought along. That said, this move, at least as far as we know now, is just for a couple of years, so we wanted to save the stuff that mattered to us if we do end up back in Australia.
This involved a whole lot more thinking than the normal move. We didn't want to store a whole lot of junk, only to return in a few year's time and feel depressed about what was there. So we tried to sort out in a clear-eyed way those things we liked enough to see again, from those that we needed to get rid of, to those very few things that we would actually bring with us to HK. This is all emotionally draining, having to let go of things that have had meaning in the past, but that you know you need to let go of right now.
Certainly moving countries helped us to focus our minds about some of these issues. M has been through this before, in her move from the States eight years ago, so she had some experience of this. The last time I moved countries was when I was twelve, and I am ashamed to say I did not do much of the work involved back then. So this felt like a first for me, and the hardest thing was definitely getting rid of paperwork, both sentimental (25 years of mail) and utilitarian (Do I really need this document? Will I ever need to refer to it again? Can I just find it online now anyway?)
The second hardest thing was definitely finding responsible ways to get rid of things that we no longer needed. As a passionate environmentalist, I know that waste is one of our biggest issues in the 'Western' world. Australians love to buy new things, and chuck out the old ones fairly thoughtlessly. So with every thing that we got rid of, we needed to work out whether someone we knew could use it, whether it was 'valuable' enough to give to an op shop, whether it could be realistically composted (I know some people compost old clothes, but having watched how fast things break down in my own compost, I know they don't do so quickly in a dry climate, and the new tenant doesn't need a whole bunch of old clothes masquerading as compost), or whether it needed to be thrown away, and even then, did it need to be thrown away correctly (recycled, 'detox your home', regular landfill). Phew! All very exhausting.
In my fantasies I had hoped to be able to spend half of my time packing, and the other half enjoying the company of all the relatives that were visiting (M's mom, my twin sister and her family). In reality, moving consumed nearly every available moment, except for when we specifically made an effort to spend good times with our niece and nephews, or had big family events on for Christmas. It even consumed many supposedly sleeping moments, as we woke in the night remembering yet another thing that needed to be added to the to-do list.
Like I said, 'hell'. M and I are both very organised people, AND we didn't have our own children to worry about, AND we had both finished work early to do this move, and it was still completely horrible. Now that we've moved we say we've got jetlag, but I think it is more like moving-lag.
It was quite a curious experience to spend the last night in an almost entirely empty house, aside from our suitcases, and now to find ourselves in an enormous apartment, that might as well be empty, because although it is furnished (imagine completely empty cupboards, aside from the dust bunnies), it feels empty. Is this an incitement to what Buddhists would call 'non-attachment'?
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