Time Capsules

I don’t know if anyone has noticed (message from my approval-seeking-self: hi, please have noticed!) but I have been away from this blog for a while. Part of it is that I’m mulling over the next bits for the Gumshoe’s Guide. (As of now the guide is going to be eight parts and that’s a wee bit overwhelming, especially since I keep being visited by thoughts at the most inconvenient moments that go like this:  OH AND THIS TOO! gah, how could I have forgotten this super-crucial part? I totally suck!)

But that main reason is that I was moving cross-country. Wait–didn’t I just do that in April? Well, yes. Sort of. I guess you could say I have been a transformational experience junkie this year. What I did in April was pack up my beloved mutt and my volkswagen and drive to Seattle to live for a few months. But I left my apartment in Virginia more or less intact. Most of the spring and summer was an “experiment” in seeing what it would be like to live here. Even though I was pretty sure that it would be awesome and I’d want live here forever. (It was, and I do.)

If there is anything that growing up has taught me it is a healthy appreciation of you don’t really know until you try it. Which sort of applies to everything. Big dreams, moves, jobs, fantasies. I can have an idea of what I might enjoy, based on knowing my likes and dislikes pretty well, but really there is no way for me to know for sure until I do it.  This concept is slightly terrifying if you are someone like me. I have a vivid imagination, and tend to be seduced by things I would like to like to do (gardening, hiking the inca trail, teaching yoga, and cooking elaborate organic meals come instantly to mind).

And if there is one corollary to this lesson I’ve learned, it’s that the thing I hate most in the entire world is feeling trapped. Whether it’s a job, a location, or a relationship–basically any situation it would be difficult to get myself out of. Yes, of course I know the deep truth is that I always have options, and believing I don’t is an illusion. However, the idea of moving my stuff cross-country all at once seemed like it had a high potential to limit my thoughts about my options. Which might lead to some serious panic, wholly unrelated to how much I liked being here. So I wanted to avoid that. Or at least chop it up into little pieces I could digest one at a time.

I called it keeping my options open. Someone more blunt might call it hedging my bets.

Whatever. All of this is to explain how I ended up spending these past three weeks making a move I’ve technically already made. (There was also a quickie roadtrip to San Francisco, where I attended Havi‘s Dance of Shiva workshop…which wow, needs its own entry. Also note to self for future-planning-purposes: driving from Seattle to SF in no way =”quickie” anything.)

So I flew back east for a couple of weeks to pack up my entire apartment full of stuff. Since I’d spent three months living in Seattle, opening the door to my apartment was like opening a little time capsule. Everything was exactly as I had left it in my previous life. I found older time capsules too, as I sorted through all of the “stuff” I had brought in boxes when I moved down there four years ago. I was surprised to find many painful things that used to burn when I touched them had cooled over time. Stuff I thought I would hold onto forever was easily discarded, while treasure appeared in unexpected places.

The most literal time capsule came when my dad brought over a box that I had given him to store for me in 1992, the year I graduated high school and left for college. The top read “EILEEN’S STUFF : PLEASE DO NOT THROW AWAY– VERY IMPORTANT!” in my self-consciously perfect high school handwriting.

I opened the box and wondered, who was this girl and what was she talking about?

Almost nothing in the box was important to me now, exactly a lifetime later. There were school binders and term papers (including one about Robinson Crusoe on which my AP humanities teacher had written paragraphs excoriating me for using commas incorrectly, or some very fine point of grammar that I honestly still do not understand. “This sort of carelessness will result in failing grades in college!” Oh, okay.) My high school diploma (Does one need to keep this for any reason? Don’t they have records if anyone ever wanted to check up on me?) Concert tickets and programs and other ephemera. Elementary school yearbooks (I know some people consider this stuff important, I don’t. Clearly I’m a lot less sentimental than I was at seventeen.)

There was also some stuff that maybe wasn’t important but I felt worth keeping. Notes on the monomyth of Joseph Campbell (whose philosophy ended up being incredibly important to me later on, so I’m ridiculously tickled and amazed that high-school Eileen kept these.) One photo of me and my BFFs with extremely bad early-90s hair and heartbreakingly beautiful skin.  A book of nursery rhymes that I remember my mother reading to me when I was a kid. I’m glad to have these things now, but wouldn’t have missed them in the slightest if I had never laid eyes on them again.

So as I obsessively sometimes do, I started thinking in metaphors.

What STUFF of mine seems so VERY IMPORTANT right now? Is there anything I can put in a box in the garage for a while, or give to someone else for safekeeping? Because maybe, by the time I unpack it later, I’ll know exactly what to do with it.