How much life is brought and how much is left behind?

Before I moved I gave a lot of thought to ways that my life would be different after the move and ways that it would be the same. In other words, how much of life itself is brought along and how much has to be left behind. It is really kind of amazing how much of life is actually brought along, but these are the parts of life we tend to take for granted.

For example, I have calendars and books that I use to organize my life. They were packed last and unpacked fairly early, so I’ve continued to do that part of my life basically the same. And that is a comfort, because it is familiar. The computer goes along with that. All the files that I used to make menus and keep track of other things came right along with us, so there was very little disruption in those sorts of activities.

Other things are even more basic. I brought my toothbrush and other toiletries along and set them up on different shelves in the bathroom. But the ritual remained the same. I comb my hair with the same comb after I wash it with the same shampoo and wash myself with the same body wash and towel off with the same towel.  And I weigh myself on the same scale and see the same stupid weight I saw back in Chetek!

I discovered quite soon that piano practicing wasn’t so much about the piano as it was about the music, which came along. So I may be playing on a different piano, but the experience is just about the same, because I’m practicing the same pieces and wearing the same “piano glasses” to do it.

So we do bring a lot of our life itself along when we move.

What didn’t come along?

What didn’t come along was mostly people – piano students, people at the senior center, people at church. These people were not my life, but part of my life revolved around each of them, whether it was a specific person’s piano lesson or a specific person coming up to say a word to me at the piano during Friday Salad Bar at the senior center.

I would not call these people my friends. Our relationships were not that close. So I didn’t know how much I would miss them. But I do, not so much because of them specifically, but because my life was built around those things that I did with or for them. I enjoyed my piano students, but there were many that I found frustrating. Still, the time I spent with them gave a small measure of meaning to my life.  And when you put them all together, it gave a lot of meaning to my life.

I think what I’m saying was that what I brought with me was the mundane things of life – the things that are done pretty much as a matter of course, and give life a comforting structure. But the things that got left behind were the things that gave my life meaning. Realizing this helps me see how much sense it makes that it is taking so long to feel meaning in my life again. I still only have a handful of people around which a meaningful activity occurs. I have 4 piano students. I have one choir director, along with many choir students that I don’t know anything about yet.

But life is gradually filling. I met a senior center director yesterday and that encounter might lead to more meaningful activities. And so I continue to fill my life with new versions of that which was left behind.

Note: I’ll be writing the rest of this narrative elsewhere.