I feel as if the title of this blog post is evergreen, and has been for the past year at least. Sadly, the answer is consistently “Ready in mind, but not ready in any physical preparations.” Also, sadly, I suspect the future will continue to bring endless opportunities to feel unprepared for our next upcoming adventure. A number of people asked me if I’m afraid, and I continue to feel like that is an unhelpful question, or maybe what I feel is that to be afraid is completely unhelpful. Fear makes you freeze, hesitate, and second guess yourself. Instead, I just choose to feel busy and excited. It’s a practice, for sure.
Our moving PODS container arrives this morning and we have one week to empty it, as opposed to the one day we gave ourselves to load it.
We have spent the past week emptying, cleaning and organizing the barn, but still I feel like I am not at all comfortable unloading and leaving any of our stuff in there. Part of it is due to the amount of decades-old stuff we already stored in there, hoping to retrieve it one day. Another part is the way Mother Nature takes over the things that have been left in the barn, rendering them useless, either by critters making homes of them, by mold and mildew making them retched, or by moisture making them rot and disintegrate. Multiple family members storing their things haphazardly over time, or moving broken items needing repair into the shed, makes the whole place feel like chaos.
There is no blame here; it is just the reality of what having ample storage space results in–a burden. Advice to the young: get rid of it. Your descendants don’t want to look at your dead paperwork any more than you want to clean up the critter nests made from your great grandfather’s bank statements.
