Baggage

What exactly is baggage? So in literal terms it's a container filled with your things. It can be quite useful. Maybe you put your clothes in there and carry them with you on a trip, maybe it's got all of your earthly possessions and takes up enough space for a UHAUL...I personally think that airports have the right idea in how they approach this whole baggage thing. They force you to weigh your baggage and it can't be over the weight limit. If it is, not only do they charge you lots of money, but you can't take it with you on the plane. Why do they do this? Because if everyone took all of their baggage on the plane with them do you know what would happen? THE PLANE WOULD TANK. 1,000s of pounds of CRAP would literally sink the passengers quicker than the speed of a rock dropped in a pool of water.

Maybe there's something to that.

Maybe, if there was no one there to monitor us, we would just take absolutely everything we could, thinking we couldn't survive without it. And everyone would be squished together with their "die-without-them" items, sucking in air in order not to suffocate from the lack of room.

Why can't someone weigh our professional, relationship, and spiritual baggage the same way? Wouldn't it be so helpful if before we could smuggle into our new job our preconceived notions of how things will go, what others are thinking of us, and how we have struggled in the past, we could only pick a few select pertinent experiences to reference and the rest had to be relegated to the cargo area?

Or with relationships...if we couldn't drag in every fight, every tear, every painful ending, but instead pick our top three moments to reflect upon in the present...the rest could be in a storage space with a fee of 100 dollars per month and limited visitation rights or straight up thrown away.

How different would life be if that was the case?


For now, without an actual legal limit on my baggage toting, I'm going to have to use the honor's system and take a hard look at what I'm lugging on my back. The seemingly benign thoughts that tend to spiral through my head leave me feeling wound up and tense and paranoid and totally drained, so I'm proclaiming right here and now that I'll be doing self-check in. I think I'm over the limit for the day and feeling lighter already because as we speak I'm vowing to cast aside some of this dead weight.

I can feel myself breathing easier already.