Baggage
If you imagine a human being and all our accumulated experiences, it’s a little like imagining we’re all walking around with big suitcases. Everywhere you look, everyone is lugging these big invisible bags, dragging them behind, full of who knows what. The person who pushed ahead of you in line. The grumpy boss. The person you sleep next to each night. The people who raised you. All of them are lugging this big suitcase behind them.
We never seem to be able to leave our bags, either. Go to the beach, and people are lying on the sand or swimming in the ocean, but their baggage is always close by. You might put it down for a moment to go for a dip, but it’s never too far out of sight. It’s no wonder holidays often create stress – carrying a bag full of clothes and toiletries as well as your own mental baggage is pretty heavy. We’ve all seen those travellers at the airport with multiple massive cases, trying desperately to steer them in the right direction.
When it comes to asking what’s in these bags, well, the answer is a lot of weird stuff. We humans hold onto all kinds of things. We hold onto memories, illusions, feelings, and opinions. Someone treats us poorly, breaks our heart, and we say “oh, that, that heartbreak, that’s an interesting thing, I’ll keep that, I’ll hold onto it,” and we pop it in our suitcase. We collect our negative experiences, storing them away as baggage, then carting the whole lot around. More and more, as time goes on, our ever-heavier bags continue to get in our way, making life difficult. We try to build relationships, but it’s very awkward showing up at the restaurant with a suitcase. We chase career dreams, but our bag doesn’t fit in the lift. We seek better health, but it’s hard to run on the treadmill with a hardcase behind you. Our bodies are exhausted – our arms, killing us! – yet we just cannot let go of this suitcase. Never mind trying to unpack.
For some us, these bags get so heavy that we’re forced to stop. Usually when the bag is at bursting point, a person will turn around and say “enough”. We become tired of carrying all that around, and start to wonder if there’s a way to travel lighter. So we learn to meditate, which, in this story, is like a 101 course on how to unpack a suitcase. Twice each day we dive into that deep state of rest, giving the body space to start unpacking. As we unzip the lid, we start pulling out old memories and feelings, gradually clearing out that which we no longer need. It’s a damn big suitcase, though, so this is going to take some time. We’re not talking small carry-ons, we’re talking suitcases so big they almost get the “HEAVY bend your knees” stickers. Sometimes we sit to meditate – unpack – and we unearth a big, gnarly thing we collected a while ago. Like a big bag of stinky laundry. So it takes a while to deal with that one, and it’s not overly gratifying in the process. But by now we know the truth of the expression, “better out than in”, so we grin and relax into it, knowing that our meditation is doing its job, and if we can work through it and get this out of our bag, out of our lives, things are going to get lighter. It’s going to get easier to wander around with this personal history if it’s not so heavy, with one wheel falling off.
Eventually, we might even get to the point where we ditch the suitcase all together, we let go completely, and move through life carrying nothing but our present-moment selves. That might seem like a little way off for many of us, but thankfully, when the bag has been so heavy for so long, it doesn’t take a lifetime for it to begin feeling lighter.