Our dilemma

All of this process has been hard and time consuming. We’ve been at this for most of a year, and have yet to leave for China. We have the jobs, we have the visas, we’ve sold our house. And yet what is one of the most difficult things about this process? Getting rid of the stuff.

We started really early on, disposing of our things. Don and I have never been shy about throwing things away or giving them to charity, but we’ve never done it on this scale. We happily took load after load of donations to Goodwill, and it felt great. The house and garage looked sparser and cleaner, and we were getting closer to our goal. When we were ready to put the house on the market, we had gone through cupboards and the garage and we felt that we had done a good job of culling the unnecessary chattel.

Then we moved. While friends helped us load the moving truck, I looked on and told Don, “I don’t even want most of this,” but it was too late to do anything about it. When we got to Don’s parents and unloaded everything into their shop, it was depressing and, frankly, humiliating. There sat most of our life’s possessions, in one humongous pile for everyone to see. It’s impossible to know how much space an entire household of items will take up, but to have them there together in one mass was humbling and very, very frustrating. How could we possibly need everything we had moved, and what would we do with it now?

The dilemma is this: If we only go for two years, won’t we need most of this? And if we go for ten years, why would we want to store all of this? To replace an entire household will be expensive, yet will we even want most of it when we get back? It’s impossible to answer these questions, so we’ve agreed on a couple of things. One is, we really hope we can live overseas for a long time, so if that is our goal, we’re going for it, in every way, and that includes getting rid of most of our things. Second, we agree that we want to live more free from material things, and this is a way to start. As our friend Karl says, “Everything you own owns a piece of you.”

So in the end, we’ve kept some favorite furniture, books, photographs and mementos, some kitchen items, and the things the kids wanted to keep. Will we want even that when we return? Who knows? But at least for now, we feel a lot less encumbered by stuff, and hope that it is the beginning of a life focused more on experiences and less on possessions.