For many years, when we travelled, Norio took everything in wheelie bags. I, on the other hand, had wheelie bags for checked baggage, but insisted on hauling a hand-carried computer bag stuffed not only with the computer but my jewelry, earphones, Kobo reader, books, papers, zip drives – all manner of stuff which made the bag incredibly heavy. I always took an extra hand-carry bag to bring home goodies from our travels – and inevitably would be labouring through airports dragging stuff which was really too heavy to carry on and off – with the result that Norio, with a pained expression on his face, would take one of the bags and perch it atop his computer-in-a-wheelie bag.
About three weeks ago I went on a trip for Continuing Education, which included two flights each direction, and then boarding a ship. Except that this time I put the computer in a wheelie bag which would hold all the extra bits and all the books too. I still took the extra bag for goodies, but it could be perched atop the wheelie bag leaving at least one hand free. All of a sudden I was whipping gaily through airports, not burdened by the extra baggage.
In some ways as I’ve thought about this, it seems it’s a pretty good metaphor for our lives. All of us carry baggage – we can’t help it. Where we were born and grew up, the experiences we had as children, siblings or no siblings, broken hearts in relationships, bullies along the way, choice of career and who we marry, tragedy and loss, physical illness – life just not working the way we want it to, compared to someone else – can load us down to the point where we are labouring through places in our lives dragging a load we don’t need to, and sometimes all it takes is a small change in how we see and do things, to relieve the pressure and free us up for something else. Sometimes when we are dragging the baggage, we can’t see the road at all, for the effort of dragging.
…..what baggage do we carry?
