Autopilot, Unpacking, and This Year’s Lent

Our family moved this winter. We’re in the same town, just in another house about a mile down the road.  My husband and I both moved a number of times when we were children and, apparently, now have our own hang-ups about the whole process (who doesn’t?!). The most difficult part of the whole experience was not the packing up of our things. I wouldn’t suggest that we did it well, but it wasn’t the part of the move that kept me up at night.  

It’s the unpacking and settling in that is causing me agita.  

We moved just close enough to our previous home that our children remain in their schools, but the way we drive to those schools (and to the market and getting on the road for our work commutes) is just different enough that it requires a conscious effort preparing for those small changes and timing. Because we are not exploring a new town, there isn’t a shiny new place energy to glom off of and explore. So, I find my autopilot muscle memory consistently driving me back to our old house instead of the new one. The next time I’m in the car, I vow to make that conscious effort and sort out a new best way from one place to another in a town where we have lived for nearly thirteen years.

At home, we’re trying to find places for our worldly goods—so perfectly tucked into the nooks and crannies of the old house, which just kind of don’t work or fit the same way in this new house. It forces us to have a conversation wondering if it doesn’t quite fit, do we let ‘it’ go (whatever ‘it’ might be, bookshelf or shoe rack or art), or do we make it work because ‘it’ is already ours? 

Meals take longer because they require hunting around for the cumin or pan or crock pot that I KNOW IS SOMEWHERE. Clothes are scattered or maybe still packed, and our dependable, even predictable, patterns have been thrown up in the air. Let me be clear: our house is not cavernous enough to require scavenger hunts—it’s just the constant reprising of ‘we were used to living in one particular way,’ and now it’s just different enough that it’s throwing us all off. 

I have written before about some of my Lenten journeys and practices (here, here, here, and here)—reading through them, I’d say I self-identify as an ad-hoc-Lenten-fast kind of lady. Sometimes, what I need for a Lenten discipline comes to me in the middle of Lent itself—most often displacing a carefully curated planned discipline with something far more annoying, and spiritually necessary, to take on. This year has been no exception.  

It seems a small thing, but this year, my practice has been unpacking one boxed-up item a day. Just one. Not even an entire box. A pair of earrings, or a board game, or the blender, or, ahem, all of our tax documents, and putting them in their new place. Sometimes, I choose an item we need regularly and make it a priority to put it where we can all find it easily. Other days, I choose something wholly meaningful only to me—a piece of art, a tchotchke that offers me comfort, the one pair of black tights I own that don’t roll down when I walk—and that’s my item.  

Let me be clear: this new house is still a mess. I am solving no massive, overarching organizational challenges with this discipline. I will definitely not be Insta-Ready by Easter, or Pentecost, or possibly even for Saint Michael and his Angels in September.   

I keep having to remind myself that Lent is not a Chip-and-Joanna-Gaines-Renovation project, making me all new and shiny through a self-improvement overhaul. Lent calls us again and again to examine our autopilot muscle memories and to shift them slowly, intentionally, and surely, closer toward the vision of repentance that we know most deeply in our God. Our hearts and souls and minds and wills always want to take the known road home. Shifting that route, however, asks of us to notice when we end up in “our” driveway, just to realize that we chose to no longer live there.  

Changing one small habit at a time feels far more challenging than overhauling an entire lifestyle. Not everything will fit, and some things—even though we carefully packed them to come to our new life—have no more place for our family moving forward. That’s how growth happens, and I suspect it’s how the life of faith is tended to for the long journey: one small pair of earrings hung on a jewelry tree at a time.