moving

I’m moving. For a month already, I am somewhere in between places.

So, I started to think about the concept moving and the terms in which we think and speak about it.

English uses really dramatic concepts, living somewhere and then moving. Live at/ in is so existential, to be at a certain place means to be, to exist, as if place were the only determining factor to exist. Moving is indeed moving. Moving moves people, nothing stays the same, it is inherently emotional. That is probably what I like about the English version, it is so vague and all inclusive.

My mothertongue uses umziehen for it. But Umziehen is also what you do every day when changing your clothes. It sounds so ridiculously simple and casual, umziehen. What I do like in it is the connotation that ziehen carries, it means to pull; trekken. Since I am 16, I believe that there are some kinds of forces that pull you around from one place to the other. You never really know what your next destination is, how long your stay is going to be and who is going to be your travel mate and neighbour.

The german word for train - Zug - stems from the same word. I like the thought of there being some invisible rails (Schienen) throughout the universe which will eventually lead us to wherever we are going. All the movings and movements I made in the last 3 years were really random, I never knew where I would land and if it would be good there. Something just drew me here and there and on and on. And somehow, in the end, things turn out to be fine. But it can be incredibly hard to trust in rails you cannot see.

Dutch then has a really different approach to the whole thing: moving is verhuizen. If you’d try to dissect the word and translate it literally, you’d get something like “de-housing” or “re-housing”. Dutch probably has the most rational and to the point word for it. It directly points at the fact that you are leaving one house and move into another. Sometimes verhuizen evokes a picture in me of people taking their houses along, like snails. That way of thinking makes moving less dramatic, it somehow implies that what your house, your home, is whatever you can carry with you.

If I count all the places I have lived at for at least a month in the last three years, that would make… (counting… Brussels, St. Genesius Rhode, Kirchdorf, Antwerp Lozana, Mortsel, Antwerp South, Antwerp North, Deurne South, soon Borgerhout) 9 different places. That is a lot. I love and hate all of these places to some extent, but right now, the only place I am thinking of is the next station coming up, the conductor has already announced “arriving shortly” and I am collecting all me internal and external belongings and trying not to forget anything.

I don’t know what language points at it, the fact that people more or less frequently change the places they store their things at, cook, love and sleep, most efficiently.

I do know that moving is very moving to me and that I do need some rest and a base of my own very soon.