Baggage. We all have it. It varies in weight, size and content. But we all carry baggage. Some of us pick up the baggage frequently and bring it along for the ride while others toss it out the window once it starts to get moldy and stinky.
Some of us carry this baggage on our hearts- and it weighs us down at the bottom of the river and takes the ones we love with us. Or it keeps us from loving the ones we have before us- we can’t see them in our lives because the baggage is too dense.
Some of us carry this baggage in our heads- and it weighs heavy on our minds and prevents us from reaching our full potential.
Some of us carry baggage on our shoulders- burdened by weights that are always present and keeping our heads hanging low instead of holding our heads proudly above our shoulders for the world to see.
A man carries bags of nutmegs from a storage facility in Sangihe, Indonesia.
Some of us carry baggage of others on our backs, we pick up their discarded baggage, toss it on our backs and end up carrying more than our bodies can handle- and half of this shit isn’t even ours!
And some of us carry enough baggage to need three porters, four Sherpa, and a herd of pack mules to haul our crap over the hills of our days and through the gnarly paths of our lives.
But, to reach our full potential and truly experience all the amazing adventures life has to offer- we have to lose our baggage. All of it.
A porter carries baggage off an overnight ferry from Manado to Sangihe, Indonesia.
Lose our social baggage.
Lose our emotional baggage.
Lose the baggage that other people tossed at us as we were exiting their lives.
And once we decide to set our baggage by the side of the road and walk away- we need to be cautious of the monkey mind and its bad intentions.
The monkey mind picks up this baggage we shed. It sees this rumpled old bag slumped on the side of the road, and the monkey mind thinks, “yes, let’s pick through this little gem and see what we can’t dig up and wallow in.” So it unzips the bag and pulls out the pain. It tosses up the anger, it rolls around in the grief. That damn monkey mind takes all your burdened feces and throws it onto the walls of your mind just to say, “ha! take that!” And you wallow in the past. You go there. The tears well up, the anger bubbles to the surface, the self-loathing and the degradation of your past and present self starts to penetrate your psyche and dominate your thought-bubble. And you thought you’d tossed that baggage out the window when you cruising down the road a few years ago. Not so.
The truth is, we all have baggage. We all have our dark twisty places- and we all deal with this internal darkness in different manners. We deal with our mistakes, loss of life, loss of love and poor decisions and for many of us, we just toss them in our emotional cornucopia and weigh our baggage down even more.
But, what if we took each little article out of the bag, one at time and sat with it for a while. What if we hauled that bag out of its hiding place, dumped it all on the ground and inspected each little piece of accumulated crap.
What would we see? Would we have the strength to recognize the mistake, forgive ourselves for having made it and then gleam some useful purpose for the outcome? Would we have the ability to pull out the grief, hold it to our hearts and just sit with the reality of our loss? Can we pull out that broken heart, look at the tiny little pieces and then take the time to actually reconstruct that heart- mending each little piece and reinforcing the reconstruction work as we go?
Would our baggage not get lighter if we took those little pieces of pain out and set them on the side of the road and left them there? Would our lives not open to all that stands before us if we set our bags down, refused to pick them back up and just took a giant leap into the unknown? Would our travels throughout the world not be enhanced if our only baggage was truly just the clothes we need for tomorrow and the good sense to not put any additional items in the bag?
What would your world look like without your baggage? Where would you go? Who would you become? Who would you share that life with, if your baggage was gone?
Now, set down that bullshit baggage and embrace that vision.
It’s now your present- baggage-free self.
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