There’s a chance that I will be moving in the near future. Not to fret, folks, we’re only talking about a couple of miles down the road but, after more than a decade of renting in Fountain Hills, now feels like the right time to find a place I can call my own.

This isn’t the kind of thing I typically like to talk about, mostly because of the fact that – even though I’m not typically a superstitious person – I get a bit antsy discussing something that isn’t a “done deal” just yet.

But now that I’ve signed a million documents, read a whole bunch of legalese I can only pretend to understand and moved through most of the motions that eventually lead up to a key being dropped into my hand, I’ve reached a point where making this a done deal is a very real possibility. As such, I’ve started trying to figure out a timeline of what the actual moving process will be like and, yep, it takes place straight through the holidays. Great timing, right?

All of that aside, the aspect of moving that’s really taking up my think-space as of late is the prospect of quite literally packing up my life, keeping what’s important and getting rid of what can be left in the past.

This is not, of course, my first rodeo. We moved quite a few times when I was a young’un and several times more while attending Northern Arizona University. There are a couple of big differences between those moves and the one I’m facing today, though.

For starters, as a kid, the only thing I really had to worry about was my own bedroom. My folks would bring home a bunch of cardboard boxes they got from Safeway and tell me to pack up all of my stuff. But as a kid, moving was an adventure. I didn’t have to worry about packing the rest of the house, figuring out all of the extra details of actually making a move or fretting over how much the whole process would actually cost. I threw my toys and books into a bunch of boxes and, eventually, those boxes found themselves in my exciting new room in an exciting new house in an exciting new neighborhood.

As a college student, though, I could have basically lived out of my car if I had to. Shifting around from dorm to dorm, all of my earthly possessions needed to fit in about a 10x10 space. So long as I had a computer to do homework on, some clothes and a few other necessities, I was good to go. As such, moving from one place to the next filled a single afternoon and the actual process was as simple as applying for a different dorm, signing my name once and then hitting the road.

Over the past decade, I’ve acquired a lot of “stuff” in my life. I’ve got shelves full of books and games, furniture aplenty and all of those various bits and pieces that, crammed into every corner of my current apartment, make up the cumulative total of my adult life. Combine that, of course, with everything left over from childhood.

Among all of that stuff, I ask myself what I will need moving forward. What should be donated or tossed? What pieces of my past can I live without and what pieces will I discover, somewhere down the road, I wish I would have hung on to?

While I’ll be finding answers to these questions somewhere along the way, at least one thing remains the same today as it did when I was a kid:

Dear Safeway,

May I swipe about 30 or so cardboard boxes?