Of Bags and Baggage

Someone said the magic word "baggage" in a reply to my last post.  Bless you for that.

I'm a baggage queen.  Ask the family friend who greeted me and enough luggage for 3 indecisive adults at her door in Sydney, Australia after I'd travelled to her from England via Los Angeles, San Francisco, Auckland and the local Sydney suburban railway system.  She couldn't believe what I had with me.  I couldn't quite believe what I had with me, either. Nor could anyone on the train with me out of Sydney.  I'd packed too much to start with and with my propensity to collect, not to shed, I'd acquired the odd bag or two and bottle of wine whilst I meandered up the Napa Valley before crossing the Pacific.  By the time I left Sydney and flew back home to England via LA, I'd acquired even more, including 3 further bottles of wine which, I can tell you, weigh a lot.  I could have had a case shipped but no, I had to carry them. And they weren't even for me.

My weight?  Well.  That's a sore point.  All I'll say there is that I'm a magnified version of my former self.  When I want to comfort myself, I eat.  Lots of excess baggage there, ripe for shedding. 

House clutter?  Everywhere.  I'm not one of these hoarders that feature on early evening TV who have to climb into their house over piles of yellowing newspaper, but I'm not great at parting with things I don't need/which don't work/which don't serve me any more.  Even stuff I've decided to throw out or give away can spend a few days or even weeks in the hall - it becomes a kind of transit lounge - before it actually makes it out of the door.  When I moved from my previous flat - a gorgeous, sprawling high-ceilinged top floor place in an old converted Victorian school, I got rid of monumental amounts of clutter.  Or so I thought. I had to do exactly the same again when I got to the new place because I couldn't see my spare room for boxes.  Paintings that looked amazing there and dwarfed my new place stayed in a cupboard for 18 months before I got around to selling them.

There's a pattern here, folks. No wonder I get backache.

How do the pros do it?  They work at it, is how.  I was listening a few days ago to a professional rugby referee talking about how he uses a sports psychologist to help him shed "baggage" from matches when, for whatever reason, things didn't go the way he'd intended and when he's been the target of public and press criticism.  It's something, he says, "that you have to keep working at".  I bet.  He's in one of toughest sports roles there is.  In that job, you're nobody's friend.  Criticism - justified or not - is pretty much part of the deal.  By working to let go of each week's baggage, by taking the good learning and ditching the rest, he does his best to ensure that he goes on to the next match with a fresh perspective and able to focus completely on what's in front of him, in the here and now.

What a deliciously simple concept.  Take what you've learned, ditch what you don't need, move on and start afresh. Why on earth have I never thought of doing that? 

Simple - because I've never acknowledged a recurring pattern which can only come of lugging an ever-heavier sack of rocks everywhere I pitch up.  Instead of shedding as I go, I add to it because somewhere, deep in that dark spidery psyche of mine, there's a bit of me that says it's a good and admirable thing to do to be seen to carry ever-heavier loads. People will respect you more, or so I've come to think.  Quite where that idea comes from - which past life it's crawled out of - I've no idea.  But the time has come to say goodbye to it.  Mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually, it's dragging me down. It's heavy, man.

However supported you are in learning a new role in life, if you bring old baggage to it, you're not approaching it with a clean fresh perspective. You're walking in with your brain and your heart tired and wired and heavy and clouded by doubts, already convinced, even if you don't acknowledge it consciously, that whatever tripped you up or pulled you over last time will do the same again,  And you've guessed it, it does.  It doesn't only apply to jobs, either.  One lousy relationship can leave you falling into the same old, same old pattern.   

So from now on, my aim is to practice travelling light. To keep what I need, and let go of what no longer serves me.  I'm under no illusion that it's going to be easy. It's not, it's something you have to keep working at, as the pros will tell you. 

If they can do it, so can I.