Love it or leave it: Packing

Moving to a new country for a year in your 40s, isn’t as simple as tossing shorts and t-shirts and a Lonely Planet into your backpack to wander across Thailand or moving to another country for school in your 20s!

Your life is probably now more than just your books and clothes. Time and technology have also moved on and there are endless lists to make about technology to bring, digital assets to backup, cloud services to use, phone numbers to migrate and streaming services to cancel or to keep.

From years of traveling, we also now have collectibles and sentimental items from our travels around the world scattered around the house. For days after we removed paintings and personal belongings from our Toronto home, we'd walk into a room and be shocked at the emptiness of it and have the thought "sh*t, we've been robbed!"

Surprisingly thought the mind adapted faster than we expected, and the new barren version of our home seemed quite normal and we started living in our home like living in a hotel. Nothing we removed from the house truly impacted our quality of life. We've never attempted a deliberately minimalist lifestyle, but living in comfortably and happily our home with 90% of it's contents packed up and removed was a great example of how little we actually need to be happy. This year we will certainly be living with less and I think when we return, this way of life may also continue.

Love it to leave it

Or like the famous Japanese organizer said: Does it spark joy?

It took us roughly a month to pack up the house. The process did feel like a mind cleanse. We often found ourselves asking each other "should we pack this up or give/throw it away?" You constantly ask yourself these questions and re-evaluate your belongings and life at the same time:

• Why is this item important to me?

• Why did I make the decision at the time to purchase this item?

• Is this item still representing the current me?

"The process of assessing how you feel about the things you own, identifying those that have fulfilled their purpose, expressing your gratitude, and bidding them farewell, is really about examining your inner self, a rite of passage to a new life." – Marie Kondo

We are generally not people that care too much about following trends or the hot pseudo celebrity movement of the moment. But wow, going through the physical objects in our life and actively thinking about what it meant was a surprisingly valuable and important exercise. We wouldn't have done this had we not been renting out our home for our year away but after going through the process, I do think we will think differently about the objects in our lives differently moving forward.

As a big bonus, if you can reduce your essential belongings that will get you through a year to 2 suitcases and a couple backpacks, it's pretty clear that almost everything else is a 'nice to have' not a 'must have'. With little weighing you down you can be ready to go anywhere!