WHen moving reminds you that freedom and fate are endlessly interwoven: Moving day: When Fate and Freedom Collide

There is something innately spiritual about seeing a moving van. No matter when you see it – night, day, or evening – the emotions hit all at once, but in a distant way, almost if you can feel the move as your own but still be detached from it. You see the van – idling on the curb, boxes and furniture cluttering its base – and recognize it for what it is: a vessel that signals intentional movement, freedom, and choice. Even if that choice seems forced or fated.

For many of us, we feel the burden of moving day. You feel as tightly packed as those boxes, watching them get tucked into a van that was likely late. The thready fatigue of a night of unpacking looms like lead beneath your skin. There isn’t enough caffeine, or energy, or time. You stare at that van, thankful that it isn’t you dragging that couch up and down a flight of stairs this time.

Then, there is the brighter side. The joy. The newness of a beginning that somersaults in your stomach like first day of school jitters. The new furniture and photographs litter the outside of that moving van like new toys – ready for new walls, and new adventures. Even if that adventure lives in a place you’ve already been or were drawn to return to.

Either way, there is this element of choice. Of a cycle complete. A coming and going that reaches beyond moving truck tires squealing in and out of your driveway. A movement that is both deliberate and detached, almost as if there are invisible strings moving you from place to place.

That’s the beauty of moving for me: fate disguised as freedom.

My first big move (post adolescence) was from Florida to DC. The reason for it was dressed up as law school, but the intention was to escape a large city that felt like a stifling small town. Youth breeds intemperance, surely, but living in Florida always felt like a summer sunburn under a dress shirt: stifling, hot, and completely untenable. The day I left was the day life began for me. I never looked back – except to visit my family, who eventually moved too.

I moved again in 2023. My first roommate in law school was a bust. Not at first, but, like so many relationships in my life, the dynamic became one-sided. I was shrinking myself to make someone happy, with no regard for my own comfort. So, I left – the first real lesson in boundary setting after a life of none.

I spent the remainder of law school in a cozy, affordable basement apartment. It was the beginning of a long, long healing period for me. More loss came and went; more boundaries were resurrected; and I finished law school in one piece. I broke free of friendships, maternal patterns, and romantic dynamics that drained me.

But there was still something missing – something I overlooked.

Turns out, that was the person who lived above me.

My roommate became my friend, but it was a shallow relationship. I found myself shrinking again just to keep peace. I was also caring for others at the expense of myself again. Everyone else saw it, but I didn’t because I was too focused on the financial benefit of sharing a space and paying less rent to see anything else.

Then, came the call to move again. Clearer this time. Instant. Life began its mysterious way of pushing me away: the gym I attended changed hands, my commute grew more laborious, and everything just got louder. Not with eager peals of excitement, but with heaviness. Pain. I was exhausted, and drained, and left feeling like I was eternally wearing a pair of too-tight pants.

I ended up moving to the first place I visited when I crawled up to DC in 2021. Leesburg. A small municipality nestled in Loudoun County, Virginia. When I first visited, it was for the wineries. The fun. My family and I all hunched together under a shady Winery patio, a charcuterie board and wine slushies on the table before us. Little did I realize that it would be the last trip we ever really took together. If I had known then, it wouldn’t have mattered: my life was centered in DC. There was no looking back. I made a choice – had chosen freedom.

But fate? It laughed.

I would make the decision to move to Leesburg at the same table, of the same winery, on the same month, where my family sat four years prior. I could envision my sister’s eyeroll across from me; could hear my mom and dad sharing some secret joke as they stared at the green-covered mountains in the distance. I was surrounded by ghosts and the tender, invisible hands of growth. This move, while born of a need for more space, was not because I was escaping something. It was because of I was growing into something new. Someone new. I made a conscious choice to move this time. Not for survival or freedom. I moved because it was simply time.

As it so happens, fate saw  fit to move me again, a mere four months after my last move. It is far less dramatic this time, but no less fated. I’m moved within the same complex, but to a larger unit with the fireplace I wanted when I first toured but couldn’t afford. More space. More light. More air. Just more.

It’s hard not to see it all as destiny. I was called to DC; and I answered. After that move, I became wholly different person mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I met people who steered my career in unknown directions. Fell for a set of soulful eyes. Had life fall apart, rearrange, reassemble, and fall apart again. Round and round and round it went. Until I moved again and… well, again. A big moving decision that was made in the same spot that started it all: a little Leesburg winery, tucked neatly into the countryside.

Fate, as always, has its last laugh.

And what a resonant sound it makes.

Love,

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