About Luggage

Sometimes people refer to their lives' history as baggage; as if it were something they should be happy to put down or discard when it gets to be too heavy. Of course it's impossible to do. Short a lobotomy, all that you've experienced is a part of you and will you or nil you, it's going to pop into the present.

In terms of some kinds of therapy, "baggage" is the stuff one brings with one's experiences. It's learned emotional patterns. It's the junk that keeps one from making progress in life, setting or achieving a goal, adjusting to the inevitable change in one's life that comes with existing. It prevents one from being or becoming the "most" or the "best" which a one can be. Its the burden of circumstances which are less than ideal or which prevent something desired from being accomplished. "If you find your hands are full, drop the baggage and pick up that thing you desire," etc.

Everyone has baggage. Everyone sees what everyone else is carrying as baggage at one time or another.

We come into the world with a piece of luggage. By the time we're aware of ourselves as volitional creatures, there's stuff in that luggage. As we grow and age, we accumulate more luggage. That luggage is self-hood; self-history, chronicity, experience.

Somewhere along the line, some of that luggage becomes baggage. It becomes weight, excess, burden. A lot of baggage is externally applied and acquired. Luggage is mixed in with the baggage. Usually people sort things out and can discriminate between which is their luggage and which is their baggage. Some people go to therapy to learn or further refine their discrimination, and maybe even to learn how to put the baggage down and carry the luggage as if it were full of helium instead of chronos and self-awareness and experiences.

Everyone has to carry some kind of self around with them. That's luggage, even if it's only a wallet or a fanny pack. However, the baggage, the stuff that pulls one down. that can be put in a locked room in the warehouse. It can even be stored next to luggage.

This is the stuff that's come over the baggage counter and I'm throwing it here, to decide now or later what's luggage and what's baggage.

It's perception.