You thought Ikea’s furniture made for cheap chic design? Check out what passes for modern military contemporary…

PCS.

Permanent Change of Station.

Regardless of whether you’re single or married, the art of packing up your stuff and moving it every couple of years really blows. “Blows” was the word chosen by a friend who strapped her son to her back à l’africaine and came over to help me on the day movers showed up with my stuff from Senegal.

Behold Saints Elizabeth and Paul

I joined the Navy because I wanted to continue traveling while still building some semblance of life-building capital. For the most part, I’d say that I have been fairly successful in fulfilling my goals, but at the same time all of this does come at a high personal cost. The time for bill paying always rolls around when it’s time to PCS.

I’ve lost track of how many times I have stood by and watched disinterested movers box up my treasured possessions so I could reclaim them in another zip code. During the delivery phase, mountains of crumpled beige packing paper rain down inside your place, and the piles of empty boxes must be feverishly collapsed and volleyed back to hurried delivery men who want no part of your packing refuse. It’s a feverish race against time that can never be completely mastered.

The unpacking process drags on to the following day where you have no choice but to return to work and ignore the fact that mountains of utter chaos now choke your every free square foot of your new home. 

You can start to understand why a PCS move is so stressful.  You can also understand why so many of us take so long to go through all those boxes and try to create some sense of order. It’s like being forced to play the most frustrating game of Organization Tetris, and it blows because every puzzle piece that moves down your screen is different, and there’s no logical resting place to be found once it settles at the bottom. To this end, I love to travel but I loathe the PCS. It’s way more fun to travel light.

I’m thinking about this process again because I just visited my best friend who is now six months into a new duty station. As we drove up to her garage, I noted that she still had stacks of boxes sitting untouched along the perimeter. She scanned her walls of stuff and noted with pride that only in the past week had she been able to park her car completely in the garage. Really, it takes a damn long time to unpack your stuff.

Here’s another reason why this process takes so long: it’s not just a matter of fishing your curio collection from the yards of paper packing material. Ultimately, each box of mystery junk always contains a certain level of rediscovery that slows the unpacking process down to a crawl; it becomes a trip down Amnesia Lane, if you will.  In going through these things, not only will your brain flash back to where you were when you collected said items, but you will also reflect back on who you were at that particular time. This can be a pretty significant emotional experience– and often it makes you not want to go to go through those boxes at all.

Once I sized up my friend’s situation, I did not hesitate in opening up cartons that had sat neglected for too many months. See, I have the luxury of zipping through her stuff with detached abandon because I have no stake in her memory game of keepsakes. I can set up another person’s house with the impartiality of a judge because I am not the proprietor of all this crap.

Game on.

I don’t know why it is so hard, but when it comes to marshaling our personal effects through the wake of our life’s decisions, it is incredibly taxing to continually house and rehouse this stuff. Where should it go? Should I throw it away? Why the heck do I still have this George Foreman grill? Should I donate these clothes, or should I just reseal the lid on this box and deal with it…..later. Maybe at a next duty station, perhaps? No one wants to have to edit their life- and that’s why so many of us take so long to get settled after our latest PCS move. It takes a lot of time, and a heavy dose of outside “encouragement” is always appreciated.

For those of us employed by itinerant professions like the military, I would say that the eventuality of a PCS move is the major element that binds us all together. We have empathy for one another’s situation, and sooner or later we’re all going to be on the giving or receiving end of a Pay It Forward construct. When it’s not your move, it’s an absolute pleasure to help someone move in or out of their house—but when it comes time for you to go, you have no choice but to call in some favors.

I can tell you from first-hand experience that nothing looks as daunting as standing before an incongruous pile of household goods— but on the flip side nothing looks better than standing back and admiring a home that is arranged in such a way that pays tribute to your years of PCSing.  All you need is some really great friends and a healthy dose of Africrap. That’s my situation anyway…and I love it all.