{"id":856,"date":"2018-04-27T01:30:26","date_gmt":"2018-04-27T06:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aleta.life\/?p=856"},"modified":"2026-02-12T22:39:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T03:39:10","slug":"moving-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aleta.life\/index.php\/2018\/04\/27\/moving-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving On"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"For<\/em><\/p>\n

The ransom of a man’s life are his riches \u2013 Proverbs 13:8<\/em><\/p>\n

Rules for running away to sea:<\/p>\n

Rule #1: Sell the house first! Having broken rule #1 we\u2019ve been hard at work over the past four weeks making amends. The good news? The house is now sold.<\/p>\n

Rule #2: Cast off your terrestrial possessions. For the last month we\u2019ve been selling decades of stuff. Just stuff. Stuff that\u2019s gathered in our basement, our offices, our bedroom. Clothes, furniture, old LPs, everything that you accumulate along the way.<\/p>\n

Two days ago I walked into a record store and got my LPs appraised. I said to Justin (the fellow behind the counter \u2013 we\u2019d introduced ourselves) that some of these records had been following me around for 40 years, ever since high school. In my collection were first releases of Fleetwood Mac\u2019s Rumours, The Eagles\u2018 Hotel California, Joe Walsh\u2019s But Seriously Folks, not to mention several Firesign Theaters and a bunch of Jethro Tull.<\/p>\n

And while at one point the music was important enough for me to transport those LPs across the Atlantic and back, by now my entire music library is either duplicated on CDs (which we\u2019ve stored) or in iTunes, all 350 gigabytes of it. Turns out my relationship wasn\u2019t with the vinyl, but the tunes. And while digital music is certainly more brittle than analogue, to fully appreciate it on a sailboat requires a record player and gimbal that would have made John Harrison<\/a> proud.<\/p>\n

Over a beer my buddy Steve asked me, \u2018What are you keeping?\u201d It\u2019s a good question. Fortunately, it was an easy one to answer. Atavistically, we\u2019re keeping our books, photos, pictures, and a few other, emotionally vestigial artefacts. Paperwork is digital these days, preserved in Adobe Acrobat files either from original sources or scanned. What we didn\u2019t scan we shredded.<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t done this recently, sit down and leaf through your files, assuming you have some. In our case it was 30 or 40 years\u2019 worth. We found pay stubs and wondered why things have gotten so expensive. Old medical reports reminded us of our mortality; injuries and operations that, although the pain is long forgotten, nonetheless left us wondering if we would have survived without modern medicine.<\/p>\n

Then there were letters from lovers who could still catch your breath. Notes in longhand that even now have the power to impart a frisson intense enough to raise goosebumps, quickly followed by an exhalation of relief. One of so many memories that’s long since faded to sepia.<\/p>\n

A few years ago I did the math on moving. Turns out that unless you\u2019re really, really emotionally attached to your objets<\/em>, don\u2019t move them beyond the next town. Shipping a bunch of stuff across country in this day and age simply doesn\u2019t make sense, even if you\u2019re U-Hauling it. You\u2019re better off selling your old stuff, hitching a lift and buying replacements when you get there.<\/p>\n

If you are irrepressibly wedded to your stuff, then understand that you\u2019ll pay more in rent than their market value while they\u2019re stored and probably dump them at Goodwill once you\u2019ve finally decided to move on. It\u2019s just how things work. Our storage locker also has a couple of pieces of cherished furniture, some electronic gear for no good reason, and several boxes earmarked for Aleta that we\u2019ll pick up in June.<\/p>\n