Two Bags Is Not Enough

My life does not fit in two bags. 
One of my peers, Rebecca Ratner, started her blog with a post discussing how she has spent most of her life fitting herself into two bags, you can read it here. 
I can not. 


I am beginning a 3 year, 2 Masters degrees, program at Hebrew Union College the seminary for Reform Judaism. When all is said and done I will have a Masters of Jewish Education and a Masters of Nonprofit Management. I will also have lived in 3 different cities and gained a whole lot of life experience. 


This journey begins in Israel with a year at the Jerusalem campus. I will then spend summers in Los Angeles and school years in New York. I'm so excited, it's hard to contain my emotions lately.


As I prepared for this journey, I was relentless but stubborn in my packing - there were just some things I refused to leave behind. I brought everything I need with me to Israel, but it is far from everything I possess. This process of packing has made it clear that I probably can not fit my life into 2 bags nor 4 bags...to be entirely moved out I'll probably need 5 bags and a whole lot of boxes. Is that bad?


When I originally thought about writing this post, I thought I'd play more with the metaphors of fitting your life in bags, but on second thought I'm going to stick to the story side of this. I packed my 2 bags a week in advance because of the crazy amount of things I had to do in the week before I departed. I could not pack my carry ons with this much time to spare. I am very thankful to the expert packing knowledge of my friend Margot for helping me figure out how to get everything I needed into the bag. Unfortunately it was 14 pounds and I needed to shuffle some things around at the airport. However, all is well and I got all of my luggage on the plane without unexpected overage fees or problems. :)