Last week was something else. If you know Boston, you know the two-day window from August 31 to September 1 can feel like a madhouse, with thousands of people and moving trucks playing musical chairs in the streets. There’s really no easy way to say it: it stinks, especially if you’re part of the chaos. A day trip to Mordor would probably be more pleasant.
Lifting heavy-ish things prepares you for life’s dumpster fires. Moving day is never fun. There are a few things I’d rather do than move: jump into a shark’s mouth, wash my face with broken glass, or talk about my feelings—the list goes on.
Last week marked the first time in almost five years my wife and I moved. We didn’t want to. Outside of a few annoyances, we enjoyed the apartment complex we lived in. But like many people during the pandemic, we realized that living in cramped quarters in a crowded city wasn’t great, so we started searching for a bigger space in the spring.
We found a place less than a mile away and spent the months leading up to last week planning for everything to go smoothly. It didn’t.
The moving company we hired made a major gaffe. We own a rather large couch—the first piece of furniture we bought together when we moved in back in 2011, with a bit of sentimentality attached. When our son Julian was born in 2017, a week after bringing him home, we were told we’d have to vacate within 60 days because the building would be converted to condos. On the day we moved from that place, we packed the couch along with everything else, only to realize it wouldn’t fit through the elevator or the stairs at the new complex. A separate company came to meet us at our old place so they could take the couch apart, fold it up, haul it to the new apartment, reassemble it, and leave us stunned at how cool that was.
I repeated that story to the moving company for this move. They gave me a quote and I asked, “Are you sure you can take our couch?” They said, “Yes, we disassemble and reassemble, we’ve got this.” Spoiler: they didn’t.
The movers were amazing—almost heroic. But they looked at our couch and calmly said they couldn’t take it apart for liability reasons. This was bad news given our tight window to vacate or risk losing our security deposit and facing extra fees if we left the couch behind.
We were in a bind. There wasn’t a simple fix, and neither of us had a wizard on speed dial. Fortunately, we’ve spent a lot of our adult lives lifting weights, so we adapted. We ended up sawing off a portion of the couch so we could haul it down 13 floors ourselves to the waiting truck at ground level. It was an unexpected turn, but we looked at each other and decided, “Let’s do this,” and we did.
It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t impossible either. For many couples, it would have been tougher. For Lisa and me, it felt like a moderately challenging deadlift session.
I’m not looking for praise or a parade, and I’m not trying to complain about “first-world problems” like a missing kale stock at Whole Foods. But random events like last week remind me that lifting heavy things can prepare you for life’s sudden dumpster fires. So, whether it’s attending a friend’s kid’s musical recital, giving the cat a bath, or anything else that pops up, you’ll be a little more ready.
