I move house a lot.
To be precise, at least once every two years. Since I hit eighteen and became an adult, I’ve been constantly on the move, floating from city to city, house to house, chasing the horizon and being tied down to absolutely nothing. First it was just me, swimming in the depths of youth and isolation, then it was the two of us, following each other across the globe, a shared sense of sanity and logic otherwise misunderstood in this crazy world.
First it was to Japan to gain some perspective and grow up, then back to Melbourne for education; then escaping to Europe for a while to shake off my shadow and become anonymous once more; then back to Melbourne to acquire a piece of paper; back to Japan, this time as an excuse to be together; then back to Melbourne, because you can’t escape your roots; then an escape to the beach, far away from the ugly part of society and the worst of the human race.
And now we’re moving again, for the third time in two years. Packing up our lives into cardboard boxes and carrying those pieces, one by one, just the two of us, back and forth. We only moved 400m down the road this time, but there was a sense of inevitability in this move. We were just waiting for the world to give us a push.
You can’t stay in the same place for too long. You fall into a rhythm, a routine that you become captive to. You stop thinking, stop exploring, you stop getting inspired or excited. You become a 9-5 cardboard cutout, a shadow in the late afternoon sun. You stop learning or growing. You just become static, suspended in midair, your vibrancy fading more and more every day.
Humans are creatures of adaptation, of survival. The reason we’ve evolved and come so far is become we’ve been constantly challenged every day, needing to constantly plan and calculate to stay alive, to outsmart our predators. We keep moving forward, staying on our feet. The longer you stay in one place, the weaker you become; the more difficult it is for you to adapt to change. You become extinct.
Life throws a lot of challenges. We need to be able to respond to them flexibly, to think on our feet and improvise.
I hate the logistics of moving house, the stubbornness of fridges and washing machines and the excess of rubbish that we somehow accumulate, but I like the notion of change, of moving forward. Staying in our old house forever would have stunted us, pushed us into a box of predictability and dead ends. I’m still young and curious; I want to keep moving, stay on my tiptoes. I’m too young to submit to stability and the laziness that follows it. I don’t want to fade away just yet.