It’s been a long, strange week, but we survived our move. We love the new house and new neighborhood. Watching people unabashedly rifle through the contents of our garbage cans the first night we moved in and later, being awakened at 1:30 a.m. by the smoke detector after the furnace overheated may have been unexpected events, but they were comically surreal rather than upsetting. But in all the forward momentum I haven’t been able to pause and reflect, let alone pause and put my reflections into words. Figuring out where the light switches are assumed an immediacy that rumination lacked. However, nary a backward glance left me disoriented and confused. Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living, which may be a bit of an overstatement, but I see his point. Life is lived forward, but understood retrospectively. What I am left with is a life-changing week’s worth of stuff that happened and a corresponding tangle of opinions that will never be sorted out, much like the twenty unmarked boxes of crap we shoved into a dark corner of the basement. I don’t want to go through this again (and by this, I’m not referring to either the move, which I wouldn’t regret for a moment, if I had a moment to spend on regret, or the boxed crap in the basement). What I don’t want to go through is such a significant stretch of time without a narrative. Surrounded by the minutia, swept along in a rush of forward motion, I jettisoned reflection as an unnecessary indulgence, but come to find out, on second thought, the thing I need most is second thought.