Moving furniture

When I was a kid, I enjoyed rearranging my bedroom furniture. There wasn’t much to move around really, but repositioning my bed, bookshelf, dresser, and desk was like a ritualistic marker for new seasons in my life.

As an adult, I find that I only seem to change the configuration of my things when I move house, which has thankfully been a rather rare occurrence in recent years. This past weekend, the new stereo speakers my husband has been talking about getting for years finally made an appearance. As a result, we had to switch the living room around a bit. Nothing drastic, but the new location of the television and sleeker profile of its attendant electronics looks odd to me. It’s an improvement both in terms of the quality of the equipment and the space the set takes up, but it’s different. It just doesn’t feel normal yet.

Different isn’t bad necessarily, but it is change, and even desired changes and planned changes require acceptance and adoption. As I have been learning over the course of this year, I am better at making changes than I’ve previously thought.

Interestingly, making the change isn’t what gets me. It’s the institutionalization. It’s making change permanent, or as permanent as anything can be.

Perhaps that’s why I like change rituals, like moving furniture. It takes something that is largely abstract and creates a tangible manifestation. It opens up the mind as much as it opens up the room.