Downsizing — Packing — Long Flight
The Pacific Expedition begins — not at sea, but in a storage unit. Clothes to Goodwill, a truck handed off, 170 pounds of luggage on a scale. Some departures happen before you ever leave the dock.
San Francisco International Airport (37° 37′ 7.7″ N, 122° 22′ 31.5″ W)
Written, waiting for my connection in SFO.
Downsizing
The main project this week was packing for the Pacific Expedition — and it forced a hard reckoning with the clothes I'd kept in storage. I pulled everything out. Some pieces were just worn through. Some I'd never really liked. Some had quietly become dated, fossils of a past self. Most of it went to Goodwill. What survived — a suit, a sport coat, my beloved leather jacket, a couple of pairs of trousers — earned a spa treatment at the dry cleaner before going back into storage.
Letting go of clothes I hadn't worn in years was surprisingly difficult. It felt like shedding a skin — and there's a moment in that process, when the old one is gone, and the new one hasn't grown yet, when you feel strangely exposed.