Stories of Kindness from Around the World

This economy has really got a lot of people moving and not always by a choice they wanted to make.  My wife and I now find ourselves among those unfortunates feeling that pressure.

You see, at the end of last year, our counseling and consulting clientele just dried up.  Having been self-employed meant not being eligible for unemployment assistance.  As we did the math looking at retirement savings that was half-gone and quickly draining away, we had to make the painful decision to close up our office and put our house up for sale.  We haven’t lived in the house for two years yet and figured it would be the last one for a long time.  How quickly this world economic mess is changing our lives!

As I get older, I find moving less adventurous and more burdensome.  It’s not just the strain on my body that bothers me as much as the confusion and disruption from feeling forced to make such huge life transitions.  This time, just to add to the heaviness, we’re in the process of moving without knowing where we’ll arrive next.  Job searching has been thrown into the quagmire of an unsettled life.  Experts can debate all they want about whether we’re in a depression, but both my wife and I have been feeling pretty depressed from all this.  I’ve been challenged to find the upbeat in all this down that’s beating us.

But then it happened while I watched my wife packing things up.  She’s an absolute whiz when it comes to packing.  She’s the kind of person who would have really done well on one of those tests where you have to figure out how to put different shaped pieces in all the different holes.  If all she has is a round peg and a square hole, she figures out how to make it fit anyway.  I took delight in watching her size up just the right boxes for everything in front of her and filling in the gaps with pillows and towels.  Her boxes are solid!  I began feeling something like a wind lift me up and sail me through my own share of the packing and loading.

Home is wherever we are together regardless of where we go.  I have faith that we’ll move through this transition drawing strength and courage from countless kindnesses we’ll both give and receive along the path. 

Some friends will be helping us with the moving.  I’ve told them that they’re not losing friends but gaining some new vacation spots.  And I always take delight in getting to know the strangers who will be involved in our lives because of this kind of change.  We all will always have work to do, by choice or otherwise, and we can consciously make the effort to create a sense of home between us if we just try.

Home is where the heart is, and right now, ours is in moving.  Before long, it’ll be in some new place to live and work and getting to know new friends, new “home mates.”  Along the way, your stories on this website will be another source of that beautiful breeze that sails me through heavy times.  Thank you for that inspiration!