Senior Moment is a new column by Katie Hustead, owner of Paper Moon Moves, a Brooklyn-based senior move management company that helps seniors get organized, downsize and move.

Just over a year ago, I resigned from one of those huge financial organizations that we’ve all had to read way too much about in the past few years. I was successful by the Company’s standards. I had been given a few promotions and had a nice sunny office and a title that seemed to impress some of my colleagues. The problem was that I was completely uninterested in what my department did and saw no value in our services. Even worse, I had become so disgusted by the Company that I didn’t even want it to succeed. I scoffed at the Code of Ethics we had all been required to sign. Senior executives had clearly been breaking the code for decades. I wasn’t the slightest bit impressed with my professional achievements.

Life began at 5 o’clock, when all of us corporate drones packed our bags and headed for the nearest exit. My path out of the office often took me to a nursing home in the East Village, where I lead a New York Cares volunteer read aloud to seniors. Six or seven of us organize a literature Salon, taking turns reading poems, short stories, or magazine articles to a dozen residents gathered in the library. Some seniors come for the literature, some for the company, and some for the snacks. I was coming to shake corporate life and its “values” out of my system.

On a friend’s advice, I finally took a step toward finding more meaningful work. I made an appointment to see her career psychologist, Alan. He started by having me describe, in great detail, a dozen achievements of which I was genuinely proud. Together, we dissected them. Then he took me through a series of tests and exercises. A trend began to emerge: I was clearly more interested in people than in profits. And the more we talked about my volunteer experiences, the more I realized I wanted to help seniors professionally.

Seniors are comforting and fascinating. Everyone — by the time they’re in the eighties or nineties — has lived through enough chaos, grief, and beauty to publish a bestselling autobiography. And they have so much to teach us. Happy seniors should be studied so we can all learn how to make it to eighty without regret.

The job market to work with seniors was tough, and my brief attempt to apply for a job led nowhere. But Alan helped me realize that I was in a decent position to try starting my own business. While researching business opportunities that would address real needs of New York City seniors, I stumbled across the National Association of Senior Move Managers (NASMM). This organization is made up of 500 independent companies all over the country that help seniors get organized, downsize and move. This was it – I had found it! Joining this profession was a no-brainer for a person who nags her husband regularly over the state of his bedside table and gets a thrill from organizing a messy kitchen drawer.

The best way to help someone let go of something that they no longer need and that has become a burden is to find out why they are keeping it. So you ask where they got a particular item and listen to their story. By telling you that they got a tchotchke on their honeymoon, and describing the trip, they are separating out the story from the item itself. Once the story is unlocked, the tchotchke often becomes irrelevant. So I get to listen to seniors’ stories all day. Heaven.

My business plan for Paper Moon Moves practically wrote itself. I quit corporate life just in time to attend the 2010 NASMM conference in Las Vegas, where I met hundreds of experienced senior move managers with critical knowledge to share. I learned how to help a senior make tough decisions about what to keep and what to give away, how to find local buyers or auctioneers for my clients, and how to pack up decades’ worth of possessions. I also learned how to set up a new apartment so that the senior can immediately feel at home. I returned to Brooklyn and launched my business.

It’s been the best, and most challenging, year of my professional life. The business is profitable (although believe me there have been days when the sound of the phone not ringing is almost deafening and I squirm a lot more when the mortgage payment comes due). For me, success is now measured by how many times I hear things like: “I can see my coffee table;” “I can’t believe there were eight bags of donate-able clothes in the back of that closet;” “I don’t know how I made it from Park Slope all the way to California to live with my son;” “I thought this move would be impossible.”

I’m sometimes asked why I chose to work with seniors. The real answer is that the profession, and the seniors, chose me.