We all carry baggage.
Sometimes, matched sets of patinated, tattered leather, scarred from years of travel yet we drag them behind us. We drag them whether they wear us down, or teach us anything. It’s as though we believe that because we’ve earned those scars the hard way, we owe it to them to carry their weight through our lives as symbols of triumph. Of our strength. Maybe of penance. Of our ferocity and determination in the face of adversity.
Many words have been written about perseverance. About its value and worth, how we are formed and shaped by our experiences, for better or for worse. We are that, certainly. Leaving a person-shaped indentation for the briefest of moments on the fabric of space-time, and pulling away some of its impossibly heavy and invisible dust to take with us.
But no one really tells us when it’s okay to set some things down. Put them aside. Let them be from then, indefinitely, without so much as a homage in our now.
Along my own way, I seem to have absorbed some mysterious lesson that in order to have truly learned something from my trials and successes, I must demonstrate many times over that I carry them with me like life credentials. Ready to put on display at a moment’s notice in order to say somehow that the insecurities I bear, my fear of trust, my damaged self image, the way I believe in the world around me (and why I sometimes don’t) are all earned, like so many embroidered badges on my Girl Scout sash.
In my scuffed luggage sits a sack of stones, dinted and pocked with age and travel. The painstaking time I spend to take them out of the sack sometimes, and build the bunker to hide in. The one I take twisted pride in building again and again, calloused hands working over the familiar pattern of setting stone by stone. Because it’s familiar, it must be safe. Because I needed it once. Maybe twice. Because there are more things out there, somewhere, waiting to do me harm. See what my perseverance has taught me? These are my lessons. Watch how I’ve learned. Can you see my wisdom, my strength, writ large on these stones? Can you see?
These stones are heavy, now.
So, too, are the anger, the fear, the resentment, the doubt that are tucked in between them like so many bits of old, yellowed newspaper. I don’t think I care to keep them anymore.
My world has shifted around me in ways I could not have possibly imagined. This time, I have people who watch me lift the rusted latches of the suitcase. Drag out the stones. Start building the walls, describing the walls, running my fingers over old scars and explaining just how hard won they were.
And then as I build up the stones, they quietly take them down. As I point and talk, they listen, shoving the suitcases aside to make more room for us. It’s a frustrating thing, to painstakingly haul these stones around and build these walls and have someone just pretend they aren’t there. Damn you! This is my world! It’s made me who I am! How can you knock it down so carelessly? How….why…I don’t understand…
But careless it is not. It’s not destruction or dismissal. It’s a careful, thoughtful dismantling with the intent to help heal. It’s gentle unraveling or in the case of my daughter, blissfully ignorant glee, as she’s too young to understand such things, yet she does them effortlessly. It’s packing things away not because you’re carrying them with you yet again, but because you’re leaving them behind. It is done with respect, with understanding, but with a benevolent finality.
I know I don’t care to keep them anymore.
My word for now, for today – for ever – is gentle. To be gentle to me. To be gentle to them, whomever “they” are. To be gentle to the memory of my battered suitcases, their heavy stones, and to the bearers of so many frayed and worn satchels of their own.
Gentle.
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