Take a moment for those moving
They say moving is one of the most stressful things you can experience, after the death of a loved one or breaking up. An entire life uprooted, boxed, trucked across town or beyond and recreated in another place. We try to make our homes seem so permanent, safe refuges from the world, but they can be quickly dismantled. Moving makes it all seem so precarious.
When passing by strangers moving out of or into your building or down your sidewalk, it’s best to look away and give people privacy as they endure this trauma, their domestic and personal lives laid bare on the curb or in the lobby, their bodies exhausted, their emotional reserves thin.
In one glance you can get a sense of how a life or lives are lived: the furniture, the loud rugs, the artifacts that we all have that make sense to us but look strange outside the confines of home.
Having just moved myself, this most disruptive act provides some perspective on both life and the city itself. Even the small apartment I lived in for just eight years contained a deceptively large amount of stuff, more than I thought I had collected since I moved in. I identify as a minimalist, but in moving I’ve discovered I’m anything but, and in the last week I’ve looked at every house and apartment building in the city as interconnected filing cabinets, with each home a drawer-full of other people’s stuff. When visiting other homes, I wonder how many boxes would be needed to pack up each room.
Some of the best money you can spend, if you can swing it, is on hiring professional movers. Asking your friends to help you move is how to end friendships. You do not want your friends to know intimate details of your life, like how heavy your couch is. I always politely ignore such requests and continue to have good friends with no grievances. Pity the (relatively) rare city dweller who owns a pickup truck: they must keep their phone number and email addresses locked down to avoid constant requests to help move a mattress or dresser across town.
Only volunteer to help once your friends have hired movers, then you can be the hero who goes for coffee, holds the door open or watches the truck while everyone else is inside. Indeed, we secure our homes with mechanical and digital devices, but during a move we’re briefly vulnerable while distracted. That theft from moving trucks doesn’t happen more than it already does is a testament to how much honesty there is in the city. Still, watch that truck.
There’s something particularly humbling about seeing everything you own in just one truck, especially if there’s room left over. That’s it, that’s my entire life? Each moving truck crossing the city should be considered a sacred procession and given a motorcade to honour all the life it’s transporting.
Of course, life is so much more than just stuff, but our stuff can come to define a big part of our identity and is often the physical connection to memories that are hard to part with. If the object goes, maybe the memory will fade, too? Some decluttering consultants have people take a picture of objects before letting them go, but then there’s the digital archive to contend with, another unwieldy iceberg of hidden stuff in the filing cabinets of our lives. Moving is an invitation to purge, but unless you’re in the right mood it can be a slow and agonizing process.
The comfort and burden of stuff has created an entire industry. Look at how well self-storage businesses are doing, profitable even on valuable land in Corktown and Liberty Village. Useful for temporary conditions in between moves or when future plans are in flux, some of those units also serve as permanent auxiliary rooms: off-site storage like so many garages and spare rooms are for those who have them.
In traffic planning, there is the phenomenon of “induced demand,” where building new roads or lanes to reduce congestion only serves to encourage more people to drive, quickly filling up those new lanes. More rooms in a house or a garage encourages the accumulation of more stuff. There’s something noble, then, about the much-maligned 400-square-foot condo: it forces its occupants to live with less stuff, just as millions of people do in small quarters in crowded cities around the world.
For those of us who don’t work in the delivery business, moving is also a glimpse at how difficult it is to get goods around the city every day. It can be like you’re fighting the city itself. Finding a spot to park a moving truck in a place that doesn’t have a dedicated driveway is a challenge, and yet there are moments of grace when people let you block their drives or walks for a few hours to load or unload. Everyone has been there.
The home or apartment just vacated seems so hollow, a once deeply personal place that becomes almost immediately impersonal. All that stuff really was home after all and, as the trouble of moving fades again from my memory, I’ll start to collect yet more of it in my new place.
Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.