The God of Moving
Written by Ashay Vaidya
There is a certain type of magic involved in the process of uprooting your entire life from one place and resettling into another. It is a quiet, nondramatic, even ubiquitous type of magic. Romantics would probably call it ‘the magic in the every day’. Which is weird, because the months leading up to the few days culminating in a handful of hours that eventually decide whether you made the right decision or an irreparable error feel anything but magical.
I was ordained by the Creator and their closest sycophants, the hyper-capitalistic 8%, to spend four years of my life in a high-rise. I add venom here because most of those were a living hell. Of course, I could still find a way to place most of the blame on myself, as is my wont. I chose to move here because I found a wonderful job a block away and foolishly assumed it would go on forever. I was let go 4 months later.
Still, this story is about the ordeal that followed my impulsively optimistic decision to live in a cramped, 60-year old building with only carefully-measured room to breathe. There’s another, less dramatically tragic part, but unfortunately for the ‘glass half full’ ones among us, it comes a little later.
Everyone knows surviving Mohkínstsis is challenging enough with family and friends. Without either, well, you have to lean heavily on the kindness of strangers. Strangers who, unfortunately, were going through their own hell back in the first half of the 2020s due to a certain, completely natural, not-at-all-manmade pandemic. Understandably, the first unnecessarily energy-draining activity to fly out of the strained human psyche of most native Calgarians was kindness to strangers. And honestly, only demigods would have the bandwidth to alleviate the hypervigilance of a new immigrant with generalized anxiety disorder when society was breathing raggedly on its last ‘socially-acceptable’ legs.
I’m alive and kicking fresh snow off the path leading to my new home today because of these demigods.
*
Like any other unreasonable—or unreasonably gifted, you pick—millennial trying to survive in the current world order as a first-generation Canadian, I chose not to hire professional movers because it would cost 2 days of my salary, after taxes. Over $300 for 3 movers and a perfect job that would eliminate most of the associated stress, or $100 for an equal-partner mover who would do half the work and shoulder none of the additional associated stress. Hardly even a choice anymore.
Cue the stress. Have you ever obsessed over just how much money you can save as long as you have the time, energy, and/or neuroticism? Here’s a wild(ly concerning) example: As part of the move-out process, I was instructed to ‘return my apartment to its original condition, barring natural wear and tear’. After 4 years in a colourless unit sporting ancient furniture, with abusive staff conducting only perfunctory annual maintenance checks, and caregiving responsibilities—all while enjoying astoundingly low self-esteem—I hope you can picture the herculean nature of such a task for me. So I did what any (in)sane person would do and reached for the good old faithful feeling of trying to control the little that was in my stubby yet miraculously functional fingers… not paying the building overlords another $300 out of my deposit simply for cleaning the unit. Never mind the fact that cleaning would be practically irrelevant—management had already told me how pretty much everything would be replaced after my move out. However, all this piece of information did was reinforce my unwillingness to part with the roughly 16 hours of my life that would equal $300 worth of completely pointless effort. Isn’t the system glorious?
Back to the saving money part, I spent 10 hours cleaning my house; 2 of them scrubbing the bathtub with a dish sponge 5 inches in diameter—because why would I spend money on better supplies that feed another elaborate vicious cycle with the same winners—faceless industry monopolizers shrewd and selfish enough to build their empires by devaluing the time of the less fortunate or more conscientious. To summarize, I saved $2 on a sponge in exchange for around 90 minutes of my invaluable middle-aged time. Did my actions affect them in any realistic way? Probably not. Was it worth it? Unanswerable. Did it make me feel better? Absolutely not. Would I do it again? At this point, I would ask you to refer to the lesser-known meaning of the word ‘agency’, so you can accept, however ambiguously, my vehement ‘yes’.
You’re lucky I’m not a news reporter, or I would round off this part of my story with a declarative, generic oversimplification, like: “This is the hidden cost of capitalism.” Doesn’t make it less true, unfortunately.
*
The first time I saw my new place, there was a mischief of magpies in the back yard pecking away at what was either a cheese cloth or a piece of stringy animal meat. My disproportionate joy at witnessing this unremarkable event should tell you a lot about how starved I had been for any connection with nature.
We tend to applaud the human capacity for adaptation. But hasn’t maladaptation left equally lasting impressions on the fabric of humanity? Our desperate urgency for solutions and gratification leads us to commit atrocities that could only be justified by our superiority complex. Lacking foresight, the ability to adapt to a life without nature appears impressive. After all, we are animals. We belong in the wild. In hindsight, however, the ill consequences of this adaptation are becoming more evident across the world every day. How arrogant are we to attempt overturning millenia of evolution, and how alien-minded are those that compel us to do so?
These are my thoughts as I lug—for the 25th time—the same inefficiently-shaped donation box full of my personal belongings across the back yard and into my new home.
At this point, as promised earlier, allow me to step out of my skin and don the lively mask of optimists to thank all billionaires. My lords, until the stress irreparably breaks me, I will be grateful for the way your greed contributes to transforming my jawline into one worthy of a Greek god. And if I see yours is similar, perhaps I will not be so burnt out as to forget that mine was not divinely gifted or cosmetically manipulated—it will be earned with sweat and karmic equity.
A curious thing did happen while I was wearing the rose-tinted glasses that go so well with optimist attire. A wandering wild rabbit, fat and fuzzy in all the right places, hopped up right next to me and plopped down on the fresh white snow. Staring at the defenseless audacity of this random ball of earthly fluff, half my mind kept thinking about the million things I needed to do so I could complete my move—each of which would probably help save one cent in exchange for costing 20 heartbeats of my predestined time on this wonderfully kooky planet. But the weirdo interrupted my rumination with a piercing red gaze aimed directly into my soul through the old ticker. Then, ever so slowly, he closed his eyes, nodding off 1 foot away from an apex predator holding a flimsy box full of rusted pots and pans from another life.
I stood rooted in my spot, inhaling the snowy winter air, reverentially observing the way this rabbit’s tiny heartbeats shaped and reshaped his fur over and over, for 20 minutes.
The ways we self-soothe to survive in today’s dystopian reality truly are outlandishly exquisite, wouldn’t you agree?