Moving and Stuff

On the night of April 8, we were standing at Indira Gandhi Airport with two-and-a-half bags, and over the preceding three weeks, we had ensured that those bags contained practically all our worldly possessions (56kg in all, to be precise).

Making a fresh start involved not just the mandatory letting go of a rented house, phone number etc. but a practical erasure of our Bangalore footprint! All our furniture. gadgetry and electronics were given/sold away, practically all the books we had collected over the past many years were sold to Blossom or given to friends, the husband's painstakingly collected music CDs, all 500 of them, found new homes, and when we handed the keys of the apartment back to the landlord, it was as empty as the day the husband had moved in.

We’d always taken pride in how little stuff we owned, and how we had been able to emotionally detach ourselves from our possessions. While turning the house inside out, we discovered that we were not quite as virtuous as we thought.

One month later, here we are: in a bigger house(!) with very little stuff and very limited storage space. Here’s hoping we’ll be able to live out our philosophy this time.