For many people, carrying baggage is an everyday occurrence. I speak metaphorically, and not literally, as if in reference to suitcases or tote bags. Rather, I am thinking of the mental baggage that often comes to dominate a person’s demeanor.
The passage of human events can leave us in a state of being weighted down with things beyond our control to “carry,” or to discard. Intellectual baggage is far more burdensome than mere physical baggage in that it obscures the important measures that occur in daily life and keeps us from being able to focus on productive ideas and activities.
Sometimes the intellectual burden of one person’s baggage is shared with another, or more blatantly, shifted to someone else. Parents may try to foist off on their children their own personal likes and dislikes, particularly with respect to other people, the result being that descendants continue to hold others in disdain without even knowing the original reasons for such feelings having emerged.
The worlds of politics and religion are among the most obvious arenas in which this type of behavior baggage can be found. A politician once told me that he had been advised by members of his own party that his wife should not be socializing with the wives of members of the other party. The ultimate, logical conclusion of such a notion is that compromise should not be possible. In this case, the baggage of one group assumed a missionary aspect as it looked to include others into the vortex of its own baggage, to inflict its neuroses on the wider population at large.
Prejudice, be it religious, racial or social, is a form of imposing one person’s opinions, that person’s baggage on someone else, thereby spreading the heavy load of the baggage across a broader network. Some people have lived their entire lives confined by this weighty burden on their shoulders, or, more realistically, in their minds.
When my Good Wife and I were discussing the subject of baggage, she expostulated an interesting analogy. When travelers debark from an airplane and proceed to the baggage claim area, as the carousel wheels around containing the plethora of suitcases and various traveling bags, they claim their own luggage from the array and depart. Unless they are thieves, they do not take other peoples’ baggage, although once that did happen to me, but I was able to retrieve the piece from the perpetrator.
The same can be true for mental baggage. We have plenty of our own and do not need to accumulate others’ weighty onuses in our march through life. Giving aid and support to those genuinely burdened by grief, or illness, or worries, is a noble pursuit devoid of the process of accepting their baggage, but rather a duty in the best tradition of the Judeo-Christian experience.
I have known many individuals who “enjoyed” poor health, delighting in telling their friends about their physical ailments and vicissitudes, especially in recounting all the medicines they took and the physicians they saw. Such detail is pure baggage for most of their listeners, who were powerless to do anything but listen.
Humanitarian aid to those in need, spiritually or physically, is quite different from assuming the baggage of individuals who have allowed their lives to be consumed by obsessive thoughts about other people and institutions. Recognizing and acknowledging the affirmation of negation can be a first step in offering those baggage carriers true compassion.
When the carousel of life spins around before us, we should be careful to collect only our own baggage, as it will prove to be more than enough for us to handle.