Microcalling #2: Where We Live

We live at the table

We live at the table.

You can tell where a family lives when they move. Or maybe a few months after they move?

In our case, the first thing we unpacked was a table. And one of the few rooms that needs little rearranging centers on the fact that our table is — well — at the dead center.

As I was unpacking the dishwasher to put away cutlery and random cups (we have beautiful new glasses, but the random cups are all that people use, still), it hit me. Where we live is where we unpack.

Travel Rhythms

I spent the last half of my 20s traveling. It started with a 2-week trip to Costa Rica, leading a bunch of youth from my church. Then, another trip. Next, I started coaching a refugee basketball league near my job.

Before I knew it, I’d sold my car and the contents of my entire condo, quit my job, and moved to England. Then, Australia. In between: Germany, Zambia, much of Eastern Europe, New Zealand, and a few others.

By the time I moved back “home,” met and married my husband, and settled into life as I now know it, I had lived in or visited nearly 20 countries.

You know what a person learns after that many nations? What kind of travel rhythms they have.

I didn’t realize I even had travel routines or rhythms until I took a trip to New Zealand with my mom. I was very comfortable with my norm. I carried a backpack with everything I needed, carefully took out only what was paramount each day, putting back clean clothes and leaving a small disposable bag full of dirty clothes to the side, which would later be packed on top for easy removal once said trip was over.

My mom, on the other hand, unpacks. She unpacks and puts away all her clothing into the hotel drawers, puts facial products in the bathroom, and genuinely makes her home-away-from-home environment as close to “home” as it can be.

Since then, my only true travel buddies have been my husband and kids. And guess what? Some of us are what I’d like to call Stay-Packed people and others of us are Unpack-Home-Away-From-Home people.

Rhythms Divulge Your Secrets

We recently moved from one town to another, and it’s become clear to me that our rhythms divulge our secrets.

We can lie to ourselves and think about how we’re strategic and organized thinkers… until the next guy comes along and out-organizes us. Or we can believe we are generally detailed until we are asked for the nineteenth time what kind of trash can we want in the hall bath and it dawns on us that We Don’t Care Anymore. We just do not want to go to TJ Maxx or Home Depot or Walmart ever. Ever again.

These rhythms of unpacking, choosing housewares, and even whether we pull out a cup or a glass from the freshly sorted cabinets say a lot about us that we may not recognize, or even admit, right away.

These cupboards and a table have spoken a few truths:

They tell me I do care about which glasses I drink from but only that they aren’t the same glasses—or cups—that every other person on the planet drinks from in their kitchens. (I want to be unique.)

They tell me that I see the world through a pragmatic lens, which is why unpacking has taken me forever. I want to make sure where I put something matters in the long term. I do not want to unpack it, only to move it somewhere else later. Ugh!

They tell me what I save my strategizing for (not all strategizing carries the same weight).

I like to strategically empty the dishwasher so that I’m carrying stuff that goes in the same corner of the kitchen all at once. Because of this, I will empty some things from the top of the dishwasher and some things from the bottom only because they both belong in the cabinets facing west.

My daughter crocheted the coasters when we realized our old ones were still packed. Aren’t they fun?

Back to the Table

The table shows me that, with its random school supplies, leftover coffee from this morning, and crocheted coasters, we live where we can talk.

Our family chooses to connect over coffee, breakfast, dinner, and sometimes, dessert. (Okay, it also shows we’re serious about our food.)

I love that even after a huge move, our family chooses to connect over a snack or a meal multiple times throughout the week. It reminds me that we value each other, and we care about how someone’s fourth-period class went today or how the other person’s client meeting went.

Back to the table means we are getting, little by little, back to rhythms that show what means the most to our family.

Strategies & Rhythms for the Writer

You know what else dawned on me while I was putting away dishes?

The same Big Deal energy I use in emptying the dishwasher is the energy necessary for writing a book. Now, hear me out, all you authors who have painstakingly worked on books for years.

I am not saying our energy levels are the same; emptying a dishwasher does not equal writing a book.

I realized that the strategy behind figuring out where pieces of a book should go, which paragraphs belong and which do not, how to establish a rhythm so the reader can take away the most pragmatic points, and all the chapters being in the correct order… that requires a strategy not unlike putting away dishes.

As we look at our writing rhythms and maybe even the books we’re working on, let’s reflect on Big Deal Energy. I suggest we look at where we’ve categorized writing as Mundane and move some of it into a BDE column.

We could also do the same backward; what Mundane writing have we tilted up on stilts, believing it to be “unpacked and ready to go,” when it needs to be repacked and shifted somewhere else?

In the next post, I’ll look at writing rhythms (my most despised topic, by the way, but the one I get asked about often). And by Most Despised, what I mean is the one I have the hardest time applying in my own writing life. Stay tuned—that post should be a blast! :-)

This is part two of a series about micro-callings and celebrations in life and writing. You can read the beginning here or listen here.