Hey Daily Feelers,
Has anyone been to the airport lately? Man, you can get a ticket to almost anywhere for a good deal. But then you get to the part of the checkout where they ask how many bags you are bringing?
That’s when the total jacks right up there. I have 7 passengers and we all get one free carry-on but then each of our baggage will tack on another $100. $700 later, guess who’s wearing the same outfit for 3 out of 7 days on vacation? Someone’s gonna have to cave here.
As we let the tickets idle in the cart, I consider what is a necessity and what is just extra stuff that may or may not be vital for this next excursion.
Finally, I check 3 extra bags and accept my $300 surcharge with disgust.
That’s happened to me so many times now. I had this “lesson” pop up in my Rolodex of memories the other day as I packed up my apartment in Burbank to move 2 hours south. It didn’t seem like I had a lot of “stuff” but I did. It took weeks to prepare. I threw out a ton of things. Purged. Then purged again.
It felt good. I got to the new place and realized I owned nearly nothing in actuality. This big house with lots of rooms was very different from my apartment. Ironically, the same price. But that’s a gripe for another blog. While this looked odd at first, this big half full house….there’s this memory popping up in perfect timing.
This new chapter is like none I’ve ever experienced. Yes, I’ve lived in the suburbs. But not as a mom. An adult. A woman finding love again and blending families. Oh man. This epiphany was liberating and terrifying all at the same time. But this memory made me giggle.
See, I had a lot of baggage from 14 years in LA. Some good. Some are not so good. But it was all my stuff. And I took it with me on every job, every venture. But it got heavy in 2016. Then again in 2018. By 2020, it was the heaviest it had ever been in my life. Really heavy. Up until then, I had always found success in being able to do the heavy lifting, the problem solving, the maneuvering AND still hit my mark. I thought that made me an extra badass. And I think Life, having the wicked humor that it does, knew this was about to get really humbling.
If I wanted to keep elevating to a higher version of myself, I was gonna need to shed the baggage. Why? Because stuff can get heavy. That’s life. We all break when we hit our threshold. Endurance is only built through resistance to more weight. I knew this. I believed in this. Why I never minded doing hard stuff!!! And here I was with all my “Hard Stuff” accomplishments and I felt utterly defeated. Not that I hated it all. It was my stuff. I earned it. Paid for it. I HAD to bring it.
…..Lol or did I? That was the giggle. Somehow, over the last 4 years, it dawned on me that the very things I was so proud of were the same things weighing me down.
If I was gonna regain my momentum, be an entirely new person ready to tackle the NEW goals in front of me, I was gonna have to sit with my “stuff” and sort it out. What stayed? What had to go? And why? This was the hardest challenge I ever gave myself. But I was out of options and raw to my core, so according to the higher power, I was finally ready to do this work.
Ladies and gents, I sat with my stuff and dealt with me for quite a while. It was messy. It sucked at times. But it saved my life. I took time to turn in and churn. It worked. Piece by piece, I repacked my stuff. I threw out old stuff that was just weighing me down and kept the lessons that stuff taught me. It felt so good. Sad at times, but liberating to say the least.
I also decided to give some people THEIR stuff back. This part, whew, that felt the best. I inherited this motto of “Not my Sh**” and stuck to it. I left other people’s opinions, judgements, and predictions about me on the curb. Asked the city to bring a big dump truck and watched it drive away. It dawned on me that there was a part of me holding onto other people’s assumptions that were neither accurate nor helpful to who I really am. All of a sudden, I cared about proving my side to people dedicated to writing my character as bad in their story? Umm no. THIS was NEVER me. And I was giving that stuff back for good.
This wasn’t a one time fix. They don’t call it Spring Cleaning for nothing. Ha. That was the giggle I gave myself when packing in April. Turns out, elevation is a process. It comes in waves. It takes time. My friend even told me “it’s cool that it’s empty. You guys will have fun filling it up in no time.” Which is the beauty of the purge, right? Making room for new experiences and memories. I really appreciated her silver lining in the depth of transition.
I didn’t have to sit with my stuff just once. I realize now that it’s like a quarterly revisit kind of thing. Just when you think you’ve organized and arranged all your stuff perfectly, life hits you and you are forced to once again, pivot. Pivoting is easy when the load is light. A lot of people avoid change all together JUST TO AVOID the pivot. What happens? Stuff starts to pile up. Things we swore we’d throw away one day get stuffed into a box taking up space and serving no REAL purpose.
Avoid it if you must, but know that one day, you will be forced to open that box up and decide if it still has value. My advice, learn the lesson, lose the stuff. You can’t take it with you when you die. Most people don’t want to inherit it either. Its weight was for you, and you only. When ready to elevate, you gotta make sure you are as mentally ready as you can be. All chapters come with new stuff, but if you have nowhere to put it, all you will feel during that chapter is stress. No new memories. No new experiences. Just more baggage to check at the gate. Life is expensive enough. Let’s not bring anything with us but the memories and the lessons which are free and the file sizes small. Everything else can and must be tossed to the curb.
Nothing But Love,
JB