On Wanting Less and Finding More

Paris as a clean slate.

Well hello, Happy New Year to all. I’ve given up resolutions, but here’s a little reflection on the kind of resolution you make without saying it out loud, sometimes because there are no words for that kind of yearning. (Also: if you resolved to write more and like the idea of writing in Paris, check out The Blue Hour. a workshop I’m co-hosting in April.)

The last time I moved to Paris, I had just turned 26 and wore the city differently. I was moving so fast – everything was additive. There were always more layers of a life that got bigger and broader every year: more friends in more countries, then a partner, more work, and more responsibility. It was a technicolor river streaming around and past me, heading for a horizon that never seemed to get any closer oh, how I loved that. There was an overnight sleeper car to Barcelona where they knock on the door to offer lovers trays of morning espresso; there was interviewing Olympic gymnastic coaches in Hungary where I towered, an American Gulliver watching a line of four-year-old girls hopping along training beams just inches from the floor like a tiny army of sparrows. And there was snowmobiling in the dark of day near the Arctic Circle in Sweden and beers after midnight with a beautiful, doomed Australian rock star and his band amid the gentle pink buildings of Toulouse. It was a moveable, dizzying feast.

And always, I came home to Paris and my strange little apartment in the Marais. We slept in lofts you could only reach by ladders with rope railings. After huge communal meals, we lay on the floor because there wasn’t enough furniture. I could barely hold on to the minutes, much less the hours; it was a swooping luge ride back to New York City and the years of sweet, exhausting babies, playgrounds, and mom friends, which passed even faster. There was always an endless accumulation: more books, more toys, bigger jobs with fancier clothes, and more salary — the earning of which somehow meant spending even more money to stay sane and keep the house clean.

There was always more of everything I ever wanted.

And then, when every closet and drawer was filled, and every child was graduated, I looked around, and it was too much. All that stuff, both physical and psychic, was clogging my arteries. It was hard to move fast, think, wander, breathe, and stumble on the shock of the new.

So, as is the way of my people, I decided last year that this was the time to move 3,000 miles back to Paris. It’s a place of temporal joys — the mercurial sun that turns an alley gold for an hour and disappears for a week, the food consumed by and with love. Yes, sure, you can shop here, boy, can you shop, but it’s not the point of being here.

Without an employer to pay for transatlantic shipping, leaving America meant a grand purge. It meant choosing a few things to take instead of a few to leave, the most extreme Marie Kondo ever. Do I love that giant roasting pan enough to ship it? Will Paris me need a Butterball-turkey-sized roasting pan? The answer was almost always no.

When I got to my empty Paris apartment furnished with a camping table and an inflatable bed, I felt the same terror and hope I have when facing a blank page. Nearly a year later, I have filled a narrow hall closet, some drawers, and most of my under-bed storage. But I’ve vowed never to buy one of those e Ikea storage units because cabinets always fill up, which will slow me down. Most of my walls are still bare, other than pictures of my beloveds. Maybe I’m waiting to see who I become before I put art up.

I didn’t even buy plants for months because I feared I’d be tempting fate by bringing living things home when this life didn't feel real, and my visa renewal hadn’t been approved. Now, they are everywhere: on all the window terraces, flanking the sofa, and in the kitchen. They are both my roots and my oxygen. And there is so much bare, writeable sky outside those French windows. I can breathe again.

RELATED: On the French visa medical exam and the wonderland of universal healthcare

Postscript:

A confession: I didn’t purge everything In the frenzied sale of my apartment last January. Stuff decisions got more panicked and drastic, but in the end, there were still leftovers, things in the undecided or unmanageable pile. And that is how my kids and I ended up standing in a storage unit utterly infested with moths two days after Christmas. A small cheap wool rug was tossed into the unit at the last minute, and when we picked it up, hundreds of tiny white larvae tumbled everywhere, all over the floor by our feet, on all over the bins and boxes. We screamed, pulled the storage door shut, locked it, and ran away.

We didn’t even get to take stock of what’s in there. We know there’s china, mirrors, and all those pretty things we loved too much to give up but not enough to carry. We saw the kind of mysterious duffel bags that haunt storage units. Everyone denies putting them there, and we’re all afraid to look inside them.

Storage units begin as saviors but quickly become the obscenely expensive albatrosses of modern life. They exist to make you revile everything you put in them. We intended to eliminate the whole unit to free ourselves. But when faced with the scale of our excess baggage and the horror moths, we decided we could only manage a move to a smaller, cheaper storage unit. So today, we go back to face the moths and do what we can to untether ourselves from the old stuff. My kids are making room for lives that are still getting bigger and more complicated. And me, I’m looking for focus, for more of fewer things.