Life Lessons from Moving
Moving to America meant having to downsize and only bring what I could carry in two suitcases. So when it was time for me to move out of my dorms and into my first apartment I underestimated the amount of junk that had accumulated in that one tiny room over the span of three years. Why on Earth had I bought an iron? I never used it. Why did I have so much clothes? I only wore about ten percent of my entire closet.
As I packed box after box of my things and transported them into my new apartment I couldn’t help but wonder how I could afford having all these
possessions. Where had I found all the money to buy all of it? This scenario is a common one among my peers. Every year when students move out of the dorms, a huge dumpster is brought onto campus to swallow all the things that students could not take home. There would couches, futons, pillows, brooms, piles of perfectly usable materials stacked next to the colossal dumpsters.
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We twenty-something year olds have hoarding tendencies. We buy and buy, never thinking of what we’re going to do with our stuff when it comes time to move again. I can’t help but think of all
the refugees and less fortunate people that would gladly take most of our possessions and cherish them like we never did. One year our university did donate many things to the city’s refugee
centre, but it wasn’t a regular occurrence. Most of the time, these perfectly usable things were thrown away and ended up in landfills or burned.
I took a stand and decided to donate a good portion of my clothes. Then went all my old notebooks that were given to recycling. I found myself giving away things to friends, whose faces would light up upon receiving a little trinket or an old pair of shoes I never wore. It became fun to downsize. I only wish I could have had the pleasure of giving some of this stuff to the less fortunate back home in Dhaka. I imagined myself giving away my college shirts to rikshawalas and how they’d be cycling around the city with university apparel.
Coming from Bangladesh has given me a first hand look into people’s lives that make do with almost nothing to their name. I made a promise to myself to cut spending, to see how long I could go without buying more useless things like couch cushions or tapestries. It has been one whole week since I moved in and I haven’t spent one dime on anything other than food and a few pots and pans. My bank account looks far fuller than it usually does at the end of the week. But my outlook on life looks better too. I can attest to giving away being a much more fulfilling act than accumulating things. Shopping no longer stimulates me as much as it used to. I’m concentrating on gaining more experiences rather than possessions. I find myself making mental lists of things to do other than shopping. I can go for walks, go to the gym, explore the city, write letters. Overall, I feel lighter…both in my surroundings and mentally.
Next time you go out to buy something, ask yourself, “Do I need this? Will I use it? What will I do with it once it’s old and I can’t carry it anymore..?” You will find that usually you’ll end up putting the object back on the shelf in the store and walking away. (Not that sometimes you can’t splurge and treat yourself) Another useful tip for downsizing is to clean out your closets and storage spaces at the end of each season. Now that I have a much bigger space and tons of storage space I will need to do this more often. I think back to my mom telling me that the mess in my closet is why I have so many things. The messier I am, the more I tend to buy things because I don’t realize how much stuff I actually have in the midst of all the chaos. A clean apartment will lead to a cleaner lifestyle. So far, I still need to work on the cleaning but it is something I plan to keep in mind.
It’s funny the kind of things you can learn from moving. I might not have learned the importance of cherishing possessions and the dangers of hoarding if I hadn’t taken the big step of moving to America in the first place. Hopefully, next time I have to move I won’t have a million boxes of possessions that I regret buying. It will be a few boxes of things I cherish and value. Life lessons are everywhere if you’re awake enough to recognize them.
