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My family just moved homes to another side of town. Yesterday we picked up the last of our things from our old home, left the keys on the counter, and locked the door. As I write this, the new owners are gaining possession.

Each of us had different reactions to leaving. My husband said, “goodbye house,” in a chipper voice, like a weight had lifted from his shoulders. He was excited to look forward. My children seemed largely oblivious, quickly sliding into comments about going home to the new house and what we were going to each for lunch. I quietly sat in the passenger seat and let tears drip down my face.

In my last moments in the house, I thought of the hours I labored in that space, of bringing my babies home and swinging them on the front porch. My eyes lingered over each project that I had planned and sweated to complete and transform—a kitchen, retaining walls, a fence, a brand-new deck. I remembered the people I loved who had joined me in those projects and who had shared space and sacred moments in my home. Then there were the countless hours of wrestling I’d done in that space on my spiritual journey, the counseling sessions I had in the living room with a candle lit, the Divine Encounters and embodied practices I lived into those rooms, the writing I had produced sitting at my dining room table. For six years it has been my sanctuary, and now I’m letting it go. I ran my hands along the beautiful pillars of hundred-year-old wood that had fortified my existence, held me up this past season of my life, sheltered me. I thanked them. I prayed that the spiritual work I did in that space would leave energy that would continue to bear fruit for the next owners that moved in after me. And then I wept.

Transitions and change often come with grief.

Even good ones. We usually can’t move to a new thing without leaving something (or many things) behind. Whether it is a physical move of location; changing jobs or vocation; or welcoming or losing a member into a family or community through birth, adoption, marriage, or death. All these things come with gains and loss. This list is not exhaustive. Even when we move into a new season with relief, like leaving a job that felt like an oppressive burden, there are always things lost. Co-workers, benefits, identity, even the grief of never realizing a dream you had envisioned in that role. Additionally, something as joyful as a marriage or a birth also means a change in relational dynamics. You can never go back to the way things were before. There is both joy and grief in that reality.

Two weeks ago, my husband and I sat in our regular counseling session while he shared that he feared he had pushed me too strongly into this move. I was grieving and struggling with the emotional change. He wasn’t. He feared that was somehow his fault. I had to bluntly tell him, more than once, that I was an adult who had willingly gone into this decision with him. I knew what I was getting into. It was the right decision for us to make. It was a practical move of proximity, and also a gift of more space. There are things I gain in this move, like an office in which to write. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to also grieve. My grief didn’t mean that I had made the wrong decision. Both things could be true at once. My husband had a harder time intuitively seeing that. He read my grief as negative. For me, it’s just part of the process of letting go and honoring what I loved about the space that I had inhabited for six years.

The Myth of Ownership

In the timely way that books find me, I’ve just started making my way through Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. I’m only a couple chapters in, but I can already tell it’s going to be a deep dive, challenging and difficult in the best of ways. It’s a lot about the ego, what it actually looks like in our lives, how it operates, and how to move beyond it to a truer self. Tolle writes how our ego identifies us with thoughts, roles, emotions, and things. But none of those things are our true self. I’ve already come to a section entitled, “The Illusion of Ownership” as if he were speaking to me right now for this move.

He writes, “To ‘own something—what does it really mean? What does it mean to make something ‘mine’? If you stand on a street in New York, point to a huge skyscraper and say, ‘That building is mine. I own it,’ you are either very wealthy or you are delusional or a liar. In any case you are telling a story in which the thought form ‘I’ and the thought form ‘building’ merge into one. That’s how the mental concept of ownership works. […] It is important to recognize here that the story and the thought forms that make up the story, whether people agree with it or not, have absolutely nothing to do with who you are. Even if people agree with it, it is ultimately a fiction. Many people don’t realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are. […] In the last moments of their life, they then also realize that while they were looking throughout their lives for a more complete sense of self, what they were really looking for, their Being, had actually always been there, but had been largely obscured by their identification with things, which ultimately means identification with their mind” (42-43).

Ooph. That hits home (and now I’ll lean into that accidental but apt double meaning of that phrase.) I have felt like my home is part of who I am. It has been tied to my identity, my motherhood, my spirituality, my preferences, my values. So the change seems to jeopardize all of that.

• I’m the type of person who doesn’t want to raise my children in too much affluence; now we have a home that technically has more space than we need.
• I’m the type of person who loves old things with lots of history, not modern things of convenience with less character. Now we own a much newer, modern home.
• I’m the type of person who likes to walk the path less traveled, not the common path. I’ve never wanted to live in suburbia. Now, I’m living in suburbia.

What do all these things mean about me now?

We sold our house to a librarian, so we even negotiated to leave three of my huge bookcases behind. That felt like the pang to top all the pangs. They are just pieces of wood. We will build new built-in bookshelves in our new home. But I process the world through books. They were a gift from my mother, an incredible estate sale find. They followed me through four moves, despite how heavy and cumbersome they are. For over a decade they have held the books that have shaped my life. Leaving them behind felt like tearing out a small piece of my soul.

Yet Tolle would say, all of this is ultimately an illusion. He doesn’t spur all “ownership.” Use things, he said. It’s okay to have them, to like them, to let them be a blessing in your life. The danger is when they become too important. He points out, “Sometimes you may not know that you are attached to something, which is to say, identified, until you lose it or there is the threat of loss. If you then become upset, anxious, and so on, it means you are attached” (45).

Can I be the same person without those bookshelves? The answer is yes, even though it doesn’t feel like it in the moment of letting go.

Tolle also doesn’t shame the emotions. He says to let them be what they are, like a stream that flows past. But he also warns against over-identifying with them. My emotions also are not my identity, just as my physical home is not.

My work now is to honor and grieve the loss of what is gone, to live into the blessings of the new space, and ultimately recognize that neither of them make me who I am. Tolle writes, “If you are aware that you are identified with a thing, the identification is no longer total. ‘I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment.’ That’s the beginning of the transformation of consciousness” (45-46).

Amen. Let it be so.

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Shalom.