Me and my belongings

I have just finished packing the last box and now I am waiting for the moving company to pick my stuff up. I now know exactly how much stuff I do own here. Altogether it comprises of ten boxes, and two suitcases. The total weight of my belongings in Japan is almost a quarter of a tonne!

Come think of it I own another forty boxes back home. They were left in storage in Europe before coming here on advice of a blogger postdoc from US who relocated all of her household to Europe and then back after five years (her blog is no longer online, but she was my hero and role model). She calculated that it would have been cheaper to have her belongings in storage for five years than relocating them there and back.

This reminds me of an idea that originated in States of converting used cargo containers into houses. After your contract is over and you need to relocate to another place, whether in the same country or somewhere else in the world, you just secure your belongings to the walls, pack the container onto the lorry or truck and take your home with you. And it would be an earthquake proof house too! Wouldn't it be cheaper than packing into boxes, moving out from one property and in another, and then unpacking and painstakingly arranging it into the new location... I love those houses! They are relocatable! I dream of owning one.

Coming back to reality... So how have I accumulated so much stuff? I am definitely not a minimalist. I attach to things. It must be coming from our ancestry from hunter-gatherers. The connection is obvious. I definitely hunt and I gather. I gather stuff. Once I have enough stuff around me I feel more secure, and I feel more at home. I like to be surrounded by stuff. I do not like the empty space.

After I moved to Japan most my stuff was left in Europe, so I had to start hunting and gathering again, until the comfortable level of clutter accumulated. But my tendencies may also stem from socio-economic factors: from my upbringing when there were constant shortages of goods in the shops (it was a centrally-planned economy) and from my grandmother telling me all sort of awful stories of shortages of food and everything else during the second world war. In my home country the memories of WW2 are still certainly very much alive, even after half a century after it is all over...

So I have a quarter of a tonne of belongings in Japan and a tonne of belongings in Europe. I wonder if I were rich if I sold it all of or is it basically worthless clutter? It is certainly a drag when it comes to moving and packing it all!

God, I hate packing! I dislike it so much that it induces all sort of unhelpful behaviours that do not help me in starting or getting any closer to the end this unpleasant activity. It took me a whole day, fifteen hours of creative procrastination before I finally started packing this weekend. And then I continued well into the night to make up for the lost time.

After three days of irregular sleep of about five hours each at various times of day, I spent another six hours on procrastinating before finishing the last 10%. Actually, I only finished the last box this morning, in a frantic rush to be ready for the pick-up before 9am.

The creative procrastination was a very educational. I learned a lot about productivity, in theory of course, downloaded and installed new software, organised my ToDo lists, and therefore felt much calmer and “sorted”. But in other moments it felt like I was completely and overwhelmingly controlled by Attention Deficit Disorder: I could not focus on packing at all, I did EVERYTHING to avoid it: compulsively checked email, facebook, blog feeds. Total sheer avoidance.

...

The moving-company guy had to come twice to get my boxes. He did not have a right form and not enough space in the car at the first attempt. Now he is gone with my stuff and it cost me half of the price I calculated from their single items tariff. It was so cheap that I was shocked! Yay for Yamato, they made my day!