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The unpacking of life.

There seems to be an endless amount of boxes to be unpacked here in my new home. Living abroad in various locations has helped the amount of stuff being kept from reaching insurmountable amounts (due to baggage limits), yet still I find I’ve managed to accumulate just a few things from those seasons of my life as well. And now is time to really unpack and find space.

I’ve found photo albums from years back  in the pre-digital days, when we’d develop the photos and have the excitement of seeing how they turned out after the obligatory couple of days of “waiting for them to be ready” at the photo shop (as in a physical shop rather than a picture editing computer programme). And as I’m finding these things I am being reminded of stories. So many stories which I’d forgotten, but that hadn’t vanished. They were safely stored away in memory ready to be unpacked by a photo or something familiar.

Stories. What to do with stories? I’d love to write a book some day; a way of putting on paper and collating a few (because it would be too much to write them all) of the many crazy and less crazy things I’ve seen and lived in and through. I tell some of them at times... wrestling with the urge to start telling “it all” when someone asks a question that unplugs the stream of memories from a certain time. Yet knowing that if I tell too many details I will soon be met by the glazed-over look which indicates that the person has disconnected. And so I am constantly having to figure out varying versions of the very-much-abbreviated-trying-to-say-it-in-a-minute summary to fit the audience. It’s a skill I am developing quite well I believe.

Stories. Some stories are the figments of peoples’ imagination; telling us the journeys of complex characters, whose lives touch our lives and draw us into their reality and story. And yet they are not real and never were. And at the end of the book or film their lives will not go on.

My stories are different. They are stories of when my journey intersected with other peoples’ journeys and we travelled together. Some just for a moment; others for larger chunks of time. And during that time we ended up impacting the other in some way.

As I sort through my boxes, all containing parts of my life, I am finding things I’d forgotten about; old diaries, letter and cards from others, little decorative things I used to treasure, African salad servers, and so much more. Each attached to a season. Each attached to a distant memory. Each representing a time in my life. As I encounter these memories I find it does something to my heart. Sitting here I find myself longing to be back in those times. Times of joy. Times representing the goodness of life.  Life is still good, and yet being in a time of not being settled yet, there is a tension between the being here now and wishing I was back to a more stable season. A season of feeling settled, at home, knowing my place, and being in a flow of life.

It will come. I know it will. But I’m not quite there yet.

It takes time. It always does. Time to settle. Time to find who I am here. Time to find what life is. And so I let go. Let go of trying to make myself settle. Let go of trying to figure out how it all fits together; the what has been and the now and the memories and the present. And while I unpack my boxes I choose to be thankful for having been allowed to live the many amazing moments each memory represents, and I allow the unpacking and remembering to become part of this leg of the journey. And in that I encounter a place of peace.

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