Excess Baggage

I do not like to pack. I love going to new places but I sure don’t enjoy having to pack going there. It wouldn’t be so bad if I had tons of luggage space—not that I have lots of clothes but I just like to be prepared. You never know when you’ll get wet or snowed on or laid over for hours or days. And then there is a weight requirement. Really, stepping on a weighing scale with and without my luggage to gauge the difference in weight is not conducive to arthritic joints like mine. I’d like to reason out to the airline company that since I’m underweight for my height, they might consider giving me extra baggage weight. But I don’t think they’d buy that. I remember once when my carry-on luggage was overweight, my brilliant family friend told me I should just wear all the clothes I had in it since they weren’t going to weigh me anyway. So I got on the plane with three jackets and two shirts.

But really, it isn’t so much the weight that bothers me. It’s really the fact that I’m forced to minimize. It bugs me that someone else is asking me to look at what I really need to survive and forcing me to live on less. Because, to be honest, I had begun to think that I was getting a handle on the forces of consumerism and materialism. I pride myself on being a low-maintenance girl with a handle on my urge to splurge. I take credit for the fact that I’m not a girly-girl at all. That I don’t need to have make-up with me at all times or that I can go out without really having to be dressed to kill. But apparently, I’m not as low-maintenance as I thought I was. Because when I look at all the “essentials” I have for daily living, they are not basic at all.

What’s worse is when I find out that a friend can manage to travel with one pair of jeans when I must bring three. When one pair of shoes is all others need and I must have at least two to make sure my outfits match. And my luggage looks bigger than everybody else’s.

All the airline companies keep telling people to travel light. But I’ve noticed that it’s rather difficult to travel light when I don’t live light. There are a lot of things that I will have to learn to let go and comforts that I will have to learn to live without. I don’t want to be one of those people who refuse the opportunity to travel because it’s so much more comfortable not to try new things or not to meet new people or not to eat new food  or not to be inconvenienced in any way.

If life is a journey, it might help if I learned to live like a nomad—not to take so much with me, to appreciate nature and all its gifts, to trust in the power that moves the world, to remember that the only things I can bring with me at the end are the things I carry in my heart. Maybe I should make a habit of packing my things (whether I’m taking a trip or not) just to remind myself that life’s too short to be carrying around so much excess baggage.