My bags have been unpacked. Clothes in hangers in the closet. My dresser has everything I need to face the day with, including a small mirror that I got from the Dollar Store. I’ve bought a fourth pillow (I had four in my old bed in Manila), a hamper, extra hangers, and my vitamins from Costco. I’m all settled in my room in my new home in Sydney.
I have a desk that has a large monitor set up in one corner, in case I want to see my work or watch a movie on-line on a wide screen. My laptop and cellphone are in place, plugged into adapters I brought from home. Family photos from home are posted on a magnetic board, and those in frames occupy a corner of my big table, along with welcoming vase of colorful flowers crocheted by my daughter.
This is quite a change from my little bird’s nest in Manila that I imagined was what a nun’s cubicle looked like. My bed and a dresser occupied most of the space, and my work table was a folding desk with just enough room for my computer, a notepad, and a few knick-knacks. Here, I have enough floor space for on-line exercises, and to even lay a yoga mat, if I am so inclined.
I am in Sydney, where I have committed to live with my daughter and her family in my retirement. So far, I’ve lorded it over a large kitchen that has everything I need to cook dinner—my one duty here, where I am otherwise pampered by my daughter and three grandchildren, aged 26, 23, and 15, whose good-bye kisses as they hie off to work and school keep me smiling all day. Talk of an endorphin high!
While I am quite peacefully settled in suburban Sydney, getting here was excruciating. I applied for permanent residency in Australia over 20 years ago, but although I have visited at least once a year since my daughter moved here, I never seriously considered ever settling here. But as I aged, and my daughter showed me what the future could look like if I stayed in the Philippines, I knew she was right. It would make sense living here, where she and the health and social services system can take good care of me.
Once I committed, I had to decide what to do about my things—my books, my CDs, my clothes, knick-knacks, pictures, letters from my siblings dating back to our childhoods—sentimental junk, as Paul McCatrney would call it, or junque, as the late Gilda Cordero Fernando would say.
Then there were my files from work—material for a book my friend Binky and I never got to write about the peace process with the CPP-NPA-NDF that we were a part of; notebooks filled with to-do lists, including ideas for columns and stories that never saw print; shy attempts at poetry that never saw the light of day; and scribblings that no longer meant anything decades after.
Paulynn Paredes Sicam: I bit the bullet
I bit the bullet and shredded what I deemed useless—if not incriminating—files, and burned what could not get into the shredder. With a heavy heart, I gave away most of my books—properly curated—to specific libraries, keeping only those most precious to me, parked for now in my sister’s condo in Manila. My CDs were even more difficult to part with, even if I hadn’t listened to them in ages, since Spotify made it possible to access music without a CD player. But they went to a musician friend who truly appreciates a good song, and who still happens to own a CD player.
Long kept but already useless wardrobe items—old dresses, heavy overcoats, big handbags, fancy evening bags from decades past—went to Caritas. Used and still good blankets and beddings were welcomed by a seminary of missionaries in the neighborhood.
Then it was time to pack what I still couldn’t part with.
I have two cardboard boxes of files (for projects I haven’t given up on, to still hopefully pursue in some not-so-distant future) and nostalgic memorabilia, parked in my best friend’s house, that I promised to go through and discard in my first home visit. In my sister’s house are family junk that we will have to deal with later. And my closets aren’t exactly empty, either.
My clothes, a few books, and fancy trinkets had to fit into two 20-kg bags, which was all I was willing to pay for on my budget-fare ticket. It was actually a very wise decision on my part. Sitting here at my desk in my new home, I find that I have everything I need, for now.
While it was painful having to pack up my life and future into two suitcases, and say goodbye to things I had kept around me for so long, I am grateful for having had to downsize, discard non-essentials, and keeping only a few “must-haves,” like an old oversized t-shirt given by an officemate that I always wore to bed whenever I travelled, inscribed with “Peace Woman” and my name underneath.
Downsizing forces one to strip one’s needs and wants to the most essential, unadorned with clutter and the useless trappings of a life, no matter how well-lived, unburdened by the weight of decades of acquisitions, no matter how precious. While it wasn’t easy to let go, I have discovered what a pleasure and privilege it is to travel light, knowing that my belongings are where I want them to be, benefitting those who need them the most.
So, here I am in Sydney at the end of spring, doing my own laundry, cooking dinner for the family, and getting up early to braid my teenage granddaughter’s hair before she leaves for school. Here is exactly where I want to be today, in a house filled with hugs and kisses that I’ve missed since my daughters grew up and went their ways.
I do not know how this new heretofore uncluttered chapter in my life will pan out. I do miss my family, friends, and neighbors, and even the traffic, politics, and chaos of Manila. But so far, this simply family life in a quiet suburb in Sydney has a lot going for it.
As the song goes in Annie, the musical, “I think I’m gonna like it here!”
