New Flat, New Life?

You know the feeling, you are taking a huge risk raising the largest amount of money you ever handle to buy that new flat or house, and if you are able to keep up the payments it is going to change your life. And, for a few weeks or months, it does. However, like that new outfit you bought last season and felt brilliant in for the few times that you wore it, now it it just feels normal and you are back to where you started. Of course, if your new place is larger you now have more to clean, and how long before all that beautiful storage space is as cramped as it was in your last place?

Does is always have to be this way? And what happened to that dream, does it need to fade away?

My life has been a series of moves, either for work or family reasons, and each time it has forced me to make some decisions about what I should keep and what I should abandon. And every time it feels like I am letting go of some past idea, either something that I was involved in or saw as an image of what I could become. "I will buy and keep this coat because I want to spend more time walking, and, oh, this tablecloth will be good for those impressive dinners I will give, and..." The biggest step came when I started to get rid of books, and I don't mean those from my childhood but those I bought or were given that involved some subject I was interested in as an adult. However, it had to happen, the total number of books and the storage units they needed began to require more effort to move than the rest of my stuff put together. I remember sitting down and looking at piles of books and other paraphenalia as I prepared to pack away my life once more into a finite stream of cardboard boxes, and wondering why I was getting rid of things I actually used instead of books that I never read.

For this move, though, things had to be different. This time I was packing to move abroad, possibly never to return to my native country, to be with my new wife who was waiting for me in distant Lublin. By this time of my life I was already suffering from arthritus and circumstances meant that it would be just me and the driver who would be loading the lorry - and now those books seemed more heavy slabs of reconstituted tree than fount of knowledge. Eventually I decided to use the books as an inner layer for the boxes to help protect my more delicate possessions against the effects of knocks and to protect the boxes from being crushed when they were stacked in the container. I divided my books between the most essential and the inessential, and started using the former as packers. Eventually, all the boxes were full, and whatever books had not been the right size for use as packing, well, they were going to have to stay.

A decade later and my wife and I were getting ready for our first joint move, the first real one she had been involved in since the last time for her was when she was four years old and her familiy moved to a larger flat in the same block. Now our shelves were full of our dusty books, and some of hers had not been opened for decades. Along with this was the detritus of her family's possessions and a number of remarkable collections such as the the kitchen pan store, dating back largely to the 1980s. That was the decade that everyone seems to remember best, when there was hardly anything in the shops, and if you saw something then you bnought it whether you needed it or not - you could be sure that someone would want it eventually, and then you could barter it for something they had that you wanted. Those pans were not coming, that I was sure of, and neither were half those books.

How to help my wife learn how to let go of things? Luckily, she is more practical than overly romantic about objects, and I knew that the big problems were going to be her books, kitchen pans and wardrobe. We began almost a year before the move, even before we chose the flat where we were going to live, back when it was still a concrete shell overlooking a pleasant gully. For a week or so we went around once a day and each selected something from each room that we thought that we could do without. Perhaps a picture, an ornament, a book or even a piece of furniture. We then had to justify why we thought that we no longer needed each item. This was a period of exploration, questioning why we felt attachment to the the things we surround ourselves with, trying to define whether it was best left in our memories and whether we were keeping it as part of a 'collection', an excuse to worship quantity instead of quality.

This sorting process was the leaving side of the equation, what about the arrival side? Not what did we want to take, but what did we want in our new flat? We had plenty of furniture dating from the 1850s to the 1990s, a small museum of contrasting styles that either worked together in a strange, eclectic way or we had just become resigned to. As we started to design the interior for our new flat it became clear that what we wanted was modern, and no matter how good or how well loved, the old furniture had to go. Actually, one piece did make it, the grand old English neo-gothic sideboard, but eventually we gave it away to charity because we had no time to sell it for profit. Every time over the year leading up to the move that we had time to ponder, we would chose some item and ask ourselves if it were really part of the life we wanted to lead or just something from a potential alternative path.

The final element was the flat design itself: by limiting the amount of potential storage space we forced ourselves to make the final paring down, like removing the last layers of the fancy dress that we had adorned ourselves with, to ultimately leave the real, naked self. Scary? Very much so, and there were times when we thought that we had gone too far, that we were cutting through flesh instead of the dead layers. In spite of all the efforts, no matter how well you design a system, there will always be something that does not fit it, but in this case we were lucky as there was a basement room in our new building where we could store things to see if we really needed them. This worked well, and often in the early days we would pop down there to see if this or that was down there, and now after a year and one trip to the charity shop, there is still our old plastic laundry basket full of paperback books that we have not yet been tempted to read, plus a few other boxes of items that with each visit down there inch nearer to their final farewell.

In the weeks following our move we had to return to our old flat occasionally to sell some of the furniture we left there. One lady brought her grown up sons and their broken down Mercedes to pick up the sofa, the standard lamp and the carpet, the three elements which marked our involvement in the dworek dream, a dworek being a small manor house and the ideal of the backward-looking middle classes here in Poland. We had enjoyed them, and Ania will never forget bringing the rug home in that period between her mother dying and then meeting me, while the sofa was paid for by my father and stepmother when I had only been here a year and we needed to have something to replace the equisitely uncomfortable and tired horsehair beast I had slept on when I first spent a night in Ania's flat.

The memories still remain, and we continue to find ways back there. But our life has moved off in a new direction, although we have yet to explore its full potential. By editing down the physical elements of the decaying parts of our lives, we have made room for the living us and the many things that we need to do today. We can still experiment with our possessions by banishing them to the basement and then waiting to see if we still feel the urge to use them when they are no longer in sight, an urge which we often discover to be weaker then we could have imagined.