With just over a month to go before I vacate my flat in Abu Dhabi, I’ve begun the job of sorting through the stuff I’ve accumulated over the past five years of my life.
I’m a sentimental person and I do find it hard to part company with possessions, especially those with memories attached. The problem is that everything I have evokes some kind of emotion. So I’ve decided to be ruthless. More or less.
It’s not only physical belongings I will be clearing out before I return to Australia. I know I will also be soon saying a final farewell to some people I’ve been very close to — colleagues and my social “tribe”.
I do hope to see some of them again, and I possibly will, but nothing is certain in life. I’ll be in touch on social media, of course, but experience tells me that many of those connections will fade over time, reduced to an annual “happy birthday” message after a prompting from Facebook.
At the same time, I know I will be reconnecting with family and friends in Brisbane over the next few months. And there are still many places to travel and people to catch up with all over the world.
Right now, the big question is: which momentos of life in the UAE do I discard, and which ones do I take with me?
The physical limit is, of course, my airline baggage allowance. I’ve decided against sending a box ahead of me. Why? Because there’s still an enormous amount of my stuff in storage in Brisbane that I have to sort through before I can get on with whatever comes next.
And making that pile even bigger is definitely not in my interests.
