There’s this universal phenomenon, that every time you move, you’ll find yourself getting rid of some stuff, most of them you owned but find yourself no longer needed. Your luggage became lighter and lighter with every shift in the living environment. The process will replicate itself as you keep moving from one place to another. In the end, you will be surrounded solely by the bare minimum of material possessions.
What remains stayed is what matters to you.
I’ve always had this theory, born out from the first-hand experience of someone moves around a lot. Constantly being pushed by the wave of life, in my 28 years of living, I have never spent more than 5 years in the same house. The theory is as follows: tangible stuff is not the only thing that being pruned every time we change our living environment, but we also shed a part of our ego, characteristic and the very self of ours.
We are born and raised with certain expectations and social pressures casting upon us, like post-it labels being glued on our bodies. For instance, if youre one who being labeled “nice” (first of all, i feel sorry for you), you’ll find that, sometimes, acting accordant to the label will actually go against your true intuitions. That whole contradiction makes us all confused and creating all sorts of unnecessary, exhausting internal conflicts.
The main ingredient of the glue that makes those labels stick is the expectations of others around us. Once you are being labeled, it means your family, friends, and colleagues will assume a certain set of behaviors coming from you, this weird assumption makes it hard for you to just shrug it off and go out on your own way.
Now as you move, you emerge yourself in a foreign living setting, the people around now are more or less strangers. It could be a bit lost but the beautiful thing is, no one will bother to burden you with any expectations whatsoever, suddenly the glue lost its stickiness, the labels will fall out one by one..
And what left after the labels fell out? Well, the same principle applied here as our tangible stuff, you are left with a few, very simple, very important traits that you value - what remains stayed is your true self. And thats what really matters!
That Guy.