Have you ever felt like you are just going through the motions in life? Busy moving from one milestone to the next. Or maybe you are so focused on getting things done and checking the boxes that you don’t have the time to pause and process it all. 

We’ve recently experienced this through the craziness of downsizing our homes, which we have discussed in our lives in our Facebook Group. (You can download our free Downsizing Dilemma Guide below)

• Calling the realtor,
• Choosing a location,
• choosing a new home,
• deciding where all our belongs will go, 
• determining which items can be donated, 
• hiring the mover; 
• the list goes on and on. 

Throughout the process, you can often become so caught up in the moment of the particulars that you can neglect how it is all making you FEEL.

Signing the final documents, closing the front door for the last time, and turning over the keys to a new owner can bring upon great emotion. Is it a loss? No, it’s a change, and we quickly realized it wasn’t just about the physical house or the town, it was about the people in our lives and the memories we’ve made. 

In a blink of an eye, our kids had all graduated from college and moved on with their lives, and we too, are moving on with ours. Would we stay connected with all our friends from this area once we’re gone? Did we just lose another major part of our identity? We didn’t quite realize how emotionally connected we were to our local community: the small business owners, doctors, hairstylists, local coffee shop.… and how it would feel to move to a new town and re-establish in a new community in this next phase of life.

The sheer number of people in our community network was also instantly downsized and boy did that feel strange. We had gone from knowing hundreds of people to know very few. 

But you know what? It opened up space for us to create a stronger connection together. We have met new people as a couple and make decisions about the community businesses we interact with together. 

And then, as we stopped focusing on all of the changes, we started to focus on each other and the excitement of our future. We gave ourselves permission to reminisce about how we felt when we first met. We were flooded with memories of our first date at Sam’s of Gedney Way. It was the beginning of a multi-year journey of blending two amazing families.

We suddenly realized that if we flip the mindset from loss to opportunity, we can still bring in our old memories to make us feel connected to the spaces of our past while finding new people to make future memories with. And as this realization set in, we went from feeling sad to feeling excited! 

After living in Connecticut part-time in our second home, we were able to begin to make new connections with friends, store owners and socially by joining a few clubs. Now that we are full-time, we are digging in deeper, working harder to meet new people, blending into the community more and celebrating this big change. 

We are moved on physically, we are learning how to move through emotionally, and look forward to our new journeys ahead.