This past week we moved house. It’s exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure. It’s also a special time because it reveals something about yourself. You come across items you had forgotten and, in some cases, wonder why you bought them in the first place. You say goodbye to all the bits and pieces of a previous life, items you should have thrown away years ago. Then on moving day, you say goodbye to neighbours you have known for years.
Moving in isn’t always as smooth as you hoped. In our case, we discovered the wall sockets upstairs didn’t work, and they’d left behind a lot of their old furniture. Unexpected changes bring out something inside you. Sometimes you just have to laugh and get on with it. In our case, the left-behind furniture was a bonus because the previous owner ended up saying we could keep anything we liked and he would take away the rest – and some of it suited us well.
Moving has a way of revealing things about you: what you’re attached to and what you can happily leave behind. Then there are sudden opportunities to benefit from the unexpected. It’s an end and a beginning, and it can be poignant.
I can still remember when I was 4 years old, my father took me through every room in the house we were moving from. It was weird to me because the furniture had disappeared, so it was empty rooms and faded wallpaper where pictures had hung. In the back room, I saw the boarded-up window I had broken, where I banged my head against it when I was playing. I survived, thankfully. Then he did something that was kind and gentle. He took me out into the garden to my own little patch. He gave me a flowerpot and asked me to choose a flower. We dug it up, put it in the pot and took it to my new home.
When I’m directing, I’m often looking for the moment something changes for a character. They discover a secret, make a decision or see someone differently. Sometimes the moment is dramatic. Sometimes it is as quiet as that flowerpot I was given.
We need to bring that moment to life, shape it, and let it matter in what follows. The character knows or feels something they didn’t before. We shouldn’t lose that simply because we have moved on to the next scene.
Life can be like that too. Moving house brings out our impatience, our resourcefulness and our surprising attachment to things. It can also reveal other people’s thoughtfulness.
All these years later, I still remember my father helping me dig up that flower. Sometimes what shapes us is not just the change, but the kindness we meet in the middle of it.
