Moving Forward

What moving after 35 years is teaching me about the future

I begin with an apology to those who follow my Substack. I’ve been absent. I’ve missed sharing with you and I’ve missed reminding myself of the goodness, truth and beauty that show up even in the crowded obligations of “too much to do.”

I’ve moved. Or more accurately, my family has been moving… and will continue to move. In the last nine months my oldest daughter, my oldest granddaughter, my husband and myself have all moved. We’ve carried boxes, cleaned out closets, and painted or repaired two apartments and one house. We’ve prepped the house for sale, listed and sold it. We’ve vacated those apartments and left them (hopefully) as good as we found them. Meanwhile we’ve turned our energies toward settling and unpacking in our new home. Our daughter and granddaughter each contemplate another move in the next year, but I digress. As for my husband and I, we lived in our last home for 35 years. Hopefully, our new house will also become a long term residence.

This much moving requires continuous and daily decisions. It’s impossible to count how many times I’ve held an object in my hand to ponder the inevitable question -Donate?, Toss?, Keep, and if I keep it, where will I put it?

Learning from the past

But harder than this constant decision making is the danger of emotional assault every time I open a dusty box tucked away in a closet or attic. I never know as I lift a lid what awaits me inside - a painful memory or a treasured celebration. Those photos, business documents, letters, and yellowed greeting cards have a voice of their own. Nearly always the artifact diminishes or disappoints the purpose I intended when I tucked it away years before.

As I hold pictures of loved ones no longer with me, I remember joyful celebrations and days filled with love and connection. But I also remember hopes that faded and unrealized dreams.

Old schedules, annual reviews, handbooks and training materials remind me of my work in education. I had filed them away because I expected to need them after we completed our project. “They’ll help to tell the story of how we achieved our goals,” I’d told myself. In hindsight, the path to school improvement didn’t look so straight. We’d traveled through disappointing curriculum, staff changes, inconsistent data and shifting priorities. The details of our work faded as I considered that our students’ success was better revealed by the combined effect of their own good choices made under the attentive eye of committed teachers who infused their lesson plans with consistent accountability and gracious support.

I discarded the manuals, tests and “to do” lists in my storage bins, but kept the pictures, notes and cards. It’s the stories I treasure.

Staying agile

My husband and I decided to move closer to family so we could better support each other and to increase our security as we age. We hope that some of the challenges we have faced living apart will diminish as we tackle daily life together. But the boxes I’ve sorted through remind me that plans are often anything but linear.

Moving means you can’t stay with the services and supports you’ve depended on. So, I found myself in an unfamiliar hair salon with a new stylist a couple of weeks ago. The young woman wasn’t just good at her job she was a great conversationalist. We talked about where I’d been and what I’d done, and then she asked me what advise I would give to a young adult getting started in their career. We discussed decision making and setting priorities. I told her that I’ve found it impossible to know exactly where a decision will take you. I recommended that she make the most informed decision available with the understanding that even imperfect decisions bring new information and clues to future options.

We’ve been in our location for a matter of weeks, and already we’ve experienced something of a crisis that scrambled our best laid plans. Startled into an unexamined pathway, I grieved the original dream I’d hoped to nurture in this new place. For a moment, I lost sight of the advice I’d shared with the young stylist and the lessons I’d found in those stored away boxes.

Life’s journey takes on unpredictable turns. It won’t always be evident what went wrong, why things happened, or what to do about it. When plans go awry it can be hard to decide what to keep and what to discard. It can be hard to simply learn, when you had hoped to succeed. And it can be painful to consider that those two things are more alike than you want to admit.

Engaging daily living

When I’m at my best, I’ve learned twhen plans don’t work out to pray instead of following the temptation to withdraw or to shift into aggressive activism

The dreams I hold for my family, the positive influence I long to make toward a hospitable world that values everyone and lifts up those who suffer, these things are worth holding on to. The path to their completion (no, wrong word) the path to their advancement invites me to listen with respect, cautiously share from my experiences, but more than anything, to listen to the prompting of God’s love, to stay engaged with eyes wide open and to follow his gentle nudge toward the work that he is always doing, in my life, in my family’s life, and in this precious world he has given us all.

My home office window. It’s good to have a writing place again.