A friend who has been through many moves once
told me that, as a kid, she could not feel settled in a new place until she had
arranged her room exactly the way she wanted it. That process of establishing her
“habitat” was a necessary and crucial ritual of every move. Her room had to be
a secure place, a refuge, a safe haven where she could retreat and feel stable
in the midst of all the change.

Physical environment is an important dimension of
home. Many of us tend to associate feeling at home with being comfortable and
safe in our immediate surroundings. Particularly when we have to deal with
change and transition, having a stable – physical – home where we can relax and
be ourselves is a valuable anchoring mechanism.

I am thinking of all that now that finally we have
found a place to live – that Perfect-Enough Home that has struggled to fulfil
all the assorted requirements I mentioned in one of my previous posts. That
house will technically be ours as of early summer and I want to make sure that it
will be as much of a home as possible – for all of us, but especially for the
children. They will go through enough change in their little lives – the fist time
they have ever had to go through that kind of change – and I want to provide them
with that safe haven my friend talked about; that “room of their own” that is
familiar and comfortable and stable.

It’s not just for the children that I want to do this.
Our own lives will also be uprooted and most likely chaotic and hectic for a
while; having that sheltered place where we can retire and find some peace and
a sense of balance will be essential. Even if we will only be there two to three
years (that’s how long our contract runs), it has to be a real home. There is a
bit of a purely selfish aspect to it too. I’m the type who struggles with
feeling at home anywhere and I know I’m going to have a hard time with this
move. I’m just trying to make my life a little easier.

So creating this home is a crucial process for me, but
it is also a process I am going to thoroughly enjoy. As in the home search, here,
too I have certain basic parameters. I want our living area to be comfortable
and cosy so that we are able to relax there as a family, but I also want it to
be spacious and welcoming so that we can have friends over. I want to give the
kids a lot of freedom to decorate their rooms and play areas so that they like
being there. I want my office to be my writing sanctuary. I am expecting many
guests, so I would like a guest room that is inviting and comfy. Finally, I think
that building familiarity and continuity into this new home will be important
for all of us, so I will try to “transport” elements from our current
home, both literally and in terms of atmosphere.

While the craziness of packing and moving is still a
few weeks away, I am enjoying doing the research, reading interior design
magazines and books, perusing websites and checking out stores. I have enlisted
the help of some good friends with great taste and more experience than me.
This should be fun.

Is creating home important to you? How do you go about doing that? Is it mostly fun or duty?

I just spent a few days
in one of the most unique places in the world, which is also one of the few places
where I would move in a heartbeat. Every time I am in New York City – and this
time was no exception – it strikes me how much I would enjoy living there. I consider
myself to be the ultimate city person and New York is the ultimate city. It is
alive; it has “beat;” it has character and style. It offers a vast choice in
terms of culture, food, fun things to do. It is delightfully diverse and
international. It also has several disadvantages such as the traffic, which is
horrible most of the times; the smelly subway; the taxis, which are practically
non-existent certain times of day; not to mention the New Yorkers, who are
quite rude quite often (though, for a European, that does not mean much J). No city is perfect, but I believe that there are
cities that “fit” us better than others. New York fits me perfectly. Living
there would be energizing and fun.

So, to reiterate the
question I asked myself as soon as I set foot there last week, why on earth am
I moving to Zurich and not there?

If I am honest with
myself, I will admit that moving to New York would not be a viable option any
time soon, for two reasons, both of them related to family. The fist one is
that raising three kids in Manhattan – my preferred destination – is bound to
be a challenging project. The city is very busy and the infrastructure does not
seem to be very child friendly (how do you get down to the subway with a stroller when
there are no elevators?). Housing is not generous and it is expensive. Even
more important, schooling is an issue: getting a spot in a decent school
requires either great connections and an intense and lengthy lobbying process
(for public schools); or all that plus obscene amounts of money (for private
ones). For these and many other reasons, a lot of families tend to live outside
Manhattan, but that would be a whole different (and for me, rather
uninteresting) experience.

My second reason is that
living across the Atlantic means that I will be very far from my home country
and my extended family. I will miss both a lot. I will not be able to visit
regularly. If I want my children to have any kind of meaningful relationship with
my family and to know and embrace my native culture, living thousands of miles
away will make that extremely difficult.

When we have a
family, particularly when children are involved, our life and priorities often change dramatically.
Choosing where we want to live is a prime example of that. Many of us become
less “mobile:” we are not so carefree about moving and our criteria for
making relocation decisions are now much more complex than they used to be. The
trade-offs multiply. For most of us it’s no longer about what we want and what’s
good for us. What is on our mind now is “is this the best possible environment
(education, experience, opportunities…) that I can offer my kids?”

I guess New York City is not
the best possible environment for my children, on many levels. Probably, they prefer to live in a place that is smaller, greener and less busy. I prefer that
they live in a place that is safe and where they have access to a good education.
Quality of life takes priority over excitement – for now. Even if that
means that every day I have to convince myself that this is what I also want.

I always get nostalgic
when I leave New York. Who knows. Maybe when the kids are older. While I breathe,
I hope.

Have you had to make
compromises – in terms of where you want to live – to accommodate the needs of
your family?

A more mundane subject for today, but as I was
thinking about what I have done for the move lately, getting rid of clutter
seems to be what has been keeping me busy for the past couple of weeks.

Everyone agrees that moving is a great opportunity to throw
out, give away, discard. All that stuff that we are not going to need in the
new place – because it is worn, outdated or we haven’t used it in years – can finally
go. This happens not just because of the “urge to purge” that visits us before
a move; clearing out some of the clutter in our lives also makes economic
sense. Moving costs money, and paying money to move junk from one place to another
is not a sensible thing to do.

We have been in our current apartment for over seven
years now, so you can imagine how much clutter has accumulated. I am happy that
our impending move forces me to go through the purging process, because clutter
makes me nervous; it lowers my quality of life. Which is why getting rid of it gives me so much pleasure. My guiding principle for discarding is that
anything I am unlikely to use or refer to in the next five years (for
clothes, it’s an even shorter threshold period) has to go. I tend to do my
cleaning up at the oddest moments – basically whenever it occurs to me, even if
I am in the middle of something else. I may be on my way to the kitchen to get
a glass of water and end up coming back an hour later, after having cleaned out our medicine cabinet.

Yet, as much as I love getting rid of clutter, I don’t
manage to do it as often as I’d like to. Neither does the rest of my family
(our kids are hoarders par excellence). The results are apparent in our
apartment. I am always impressed when I visit friends or family – there are
many of them – who have pristine apartments without any newspapers or magazines
lying around in stacks; no boxes overflowing with toys or clothes; no unopened
mail or unpaid bills lingering on the dining room table.

One of the things that I find the hardest to let go of
is paper: books, magazines, notes from my university days, even post-its with phone
numbers on them (over the years, I’ve gotten better with newspapers).  In my parents’ basement in Athens, I have several binders with course material and notes from a degree I completed in 1997! My father had been
harassing me for years to get rid of them so that they would not take up all that
space, but I always found an excuse not to do it. They are still there.
However, I am proud to report that I’m changing for the better. Yesterday, I disposed of all
my PhD binders – only a bit more than a
decade old J. Bags and bags of paper. I am planning to do much more.

Why is it that I hold on to all that stuff in the
first place? What makes me think that I will ever have a reason to go back to
my econometrics notes? Or my assignments on regression analysis? Is it laziness,
lack of time or procrastination (or all of the above) that don’t let us get
to the tedious task? Or is it the need to hold on to certain elements of our
past – our achievements and milestones, our history – that shaped our present – who we are today? The binders I just threw away were the “background”
behind that piece of paper I keep framed above my desk. As if I need to justify
(to myself? to others?) how I got there. I feel liberated now that they are gone and I have all this extra space – but also a bit disconnected.

What makes it easier (or harder) to let go? Why are some of us better (or worse) “clutterers” than
others? I wonder if there is a connection
between a “nomadic” lifestyle and accumulating stuff. It could go both ways. If
you are constantly on the move, you may not want to be tied down by stuff; so
you don’t accumulate it. My husband claims to be like that (though in practice,
he’s as much of a hoarder as I am J). On the other
hand, if you are used to changing environments often, you may want to keep memories from the different phases of your life – which results in much more clutter than
the average “local” person.

What’s your relationship with clutter – and how
comfortable are you letting go of it, especially when you move?

In Monday’s post on how our expectations affect
the way we experience international moves, I mentioned that adjustment usually happens in stages. Based on my conversations with several “serial movers,” I
had a vague idea what these stages are. In fact, there is a whole body of
literature on the cycle of expatriate adaptation with a few different
models of that cycle, but roughly, the stages you go through when you move are the following.

First, there is the honeymoon stage. That’s when you still feel like a tourist in the
new place. Everything is new and exciting. It is also not real life. You can be
on this honeymoon for as short as two weeks or as long as three to four months, but
usually after that you enter the culture
shock stage. This is the most stressful but also the most crucial stage,
because either you make it past it and adapt to your new life or you don’t and
pack up and leave. It is the rough landing in real, everyday life, with its challenges
and frustrations. Struggling to understand and communicate in a language you do
not master, trying to make friends and “fit in” – all that may make you feel
isolated, exhausted, frustrated, even depressed. Studies show that most expats
move past culture shock after about an average of eight months in the new
location.

After you have been stressed and depressed for a while, you tend to
reach a plateau where the real adjustment takes place. You start functioning in
your new life, appreciating the opportunities it offers you and gaining
confidence in dealing with the challenges. You start accepting the new culture.
You are calmer and less stressed. They call this the adaptation stage. Eventually, you may reach the mastery or home stage, where you are completely functional, comfortable
and confident in the new location. I don’t dare say you feel at home, but
something like that. This can come any time between one and two years into the
move.

These stages are not set in stone. Not
everyone goes through all of them or in that sequence; some stages may recur;
their duration may vary from person to person. We may have different reactions
depending on (guess what) our expectations prior to the move, our personal
history, our personality, the similarities or contrasts between our home
culture and the new culture. Still, having a rough idea of what these stages
are makes the process more predictable and therefore more manageable. If
we know what’s coming, we can be better prepared to cope with it.

I thought of my previous moves and whether I went through all those
stages. It’s hard to generalize, but I think my “honeymoons” were short in most places, with the exception of LA, where I think
I had a long honeymoon and moved straight to adaptation (I might even have
reached “home” at some point). Boston – my first real move – had a relatively
long culture shock phase, but even there I was adjusting around the
eight-month mark. The most interesting experience, in that context, was Vienna,
where I think I remained in culture shock for a whole of nine years.

I wonder what all that means for my upcoming move and how I can prepare for it. Do we get better at this with time and experience? I would not be able to
conclude that from my own trajectory, but one can always hope.

What is your experience with the four stages? Was it always the same or did it differ among moves and why do you think that is?