I’ve just returned from a 2-week vacation with my husband and teenage daughter. Well, it was sort of a vacation. My husband had some business trips to take, so we built a vacation around them. And we decided that as long as we were traveling, we might as well start doing college visits. So it was a rather hectic vacation, with a lot more early morning wakeups than I’d like. But it was still great to be away as a family and to experience things together.
It’s also great to be back!
It always surprises me when I go to clients’ homes and they have fully-packed suitcases lying around from a recent trip. “When did you get back?” I’ll ask. “Three weeks ago,” they might reply. Yikes!
For me, one of the pleasures of returning home from vacation is emptying the suitcases and putting away everything– including the suitcases — that night. Yes, that night!
Living in a hotel room is disorienting to me because things are not in their usual place. I do my best to put the things I use daily into appropriate places (applying one of my basic organizing principles, “Store things where you use them”.) But then we go to another city and start over in a new hotel room, and I have to get used to a new schema.
The joy of unpacking is being able to return all of my possessions to their proper location. Did you ever hear the saying, “A place for everything, and everything in its place”? I do indeed have a place for everything, and unpacking my suitcase enables me to restore order by putting my stuff where it belongs. If I’ve bought any new things, I figure out where they go right away, rather than leaving them lying around and causing the stress of clutter.
Getting everything unpacked and put away also facilitates your reentry into your regular life.
(By the way, if you can return from a trip and leave all of your clothes in the suitcase for weeks, that means you have too many clothes! But that’s another tip for another day.)
Enjoy what’s left of the summer!
