The upcoming move is fast approaching, and packing for it is going decently. Yesterday, in fact, my beloved wife and I managed to get our main bookshelf packed away and broken down. Thirteen boxes of books are waiting for loading, now, ready to go when it is actually time to go, and the apartment that she and I have shared looks remarkably barren.
There is a sense of finality creeping upon me these past days, one intensifying in strength as I get closer to flying to Oklahoma to take up my new work. The sensation of things drawing to a close has settled on me a few times in the past when I have known that it is time to move on. Coming up to the end of my undergraduate study was one such. As I completed my cycle of student teaching and faced moving on to graduate school, I could feel my institution reorienting to have me outside of it. I had spent much of my time as an undergraduate at the school and involved in its activities, so to feel myself being shunted away was unsettling--and a bit depressing.
Similarly, when I made the adjustment that brought me from being on-site at my graduate program, I had a decisive feeling of change and reorientation. Something was ending for me, something that, despite its problems, had become comfortable and familiar. I knew what I was supposed to do, when, and with whom, and making the arrangements to leave that and for it to leave me was...uncomfortable. That I handled it badly did not improve matters.
I am similarly...uncomfortable now. Over the past four years or so, I have grown accustomed to The City and its ways. I have adapted to the incessant sounds of slow-moving traffic and screaming train brakes. I have grown used to the inanity of city services and the hassle of trains running as they ought to just often enough that people meaningfully hope for them. I have come to understand how unions function for the benefit of their working members--and how that sometimes screws over other working members. The crowding and clutter no longer faze me as they once did; indeed, I negotiate both with some ease (and more annoyance) now than before. And I have very much taken to the many things that are offered to my benefit here, things like the New York Public Library and the New York Aikikai, both of which have been useful and helpful for me these past years and which I appreciate very much. I understand how things work here, and I know how to work with and around them. I have made a place here, and I fill it well.
But I am leaving that place for what many here regard as uncivilized hinterlands. I know that they are in large measure wrong; there is much of value in "flyover country" and I am not unhappy to avail myself of it. Still, I do not entirely relish the idea of having to re-learn how to live, and I know that I am going to have to do so. The City works differently from other places (and I will, at some point, be writing about how), and I have adapted to it. I was comfortable, and I have disrupted that comfort to pursue other opportunities, opportunities that The City does not offer me. My time here is ending, and I know it in the fibers of my being as much as in the recesses of my mind and whatever descriptor can apply to my soul. And I cannot say that I am at ease, not honestly.
However I feel about it, though, the move is happening. It remains, then, only for me to try to face it better than I have such endings in the past.
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