The Moving Experience

I guess after mentioning last week that I was helping a friend move I should talk a little bit more about it here, huh?

I’ve noticed a sort of apathy towards helping a friend move that I’m not entirely sure I understand. Like, I get the “waste of a Saturday” sort of deal that I guess if I was working a nine-to-five I might disagree with, but on the other hand, like, they are still your friend, right? There are literally t-shirts and jokes to that effect. “A friend is someone who helps you move a sofa,” they all say.

The punchline generally is, “A true friend is someone who helps you move a body,” and maybe I’m not entirely comfortable with that, but I think my overall point still stands: one of the key features of friendship is that friends help each other. There’s value in that relationship. So yes, I did spend my Tuesday last week hauling a mattress and some chairs and a desk or two up a flight of stairs.

But at the same time, maybe there’s such a thing as too much help? I’m not trying to suggest that (a hypothetical) someone doing all the work while everybody else can only look on helplessly is a good or bad thing, no. Instead, I noticed that there wasn’t always something for me, personally to do. Once all the boxes had been marched up, it slowly became more of a “waiting to be told what to do” sort of deal.

And maybe that’s my fault for not taking the initiative. But if that’s the case, there was a whole lot of not-initiative-taking going on. A lot of the moving-in process was deemed by the tenants as “something we’ll do tomorrow/later” so trying to find something, anything to do became a bit of a process. You couldn’t ask, “What do you need me to do?”, you had to outright state, “I’m going to do this.”

Eventually, I helped build a bookshelf.

Look, I don’t want to be completely negative about the whole thing. Like I said at the start, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also wonder about the experience. When I left that evening, exhausted though I was from the work I did do, it seemed like there was a lot more that needed doing.

-F