Baggage Claim
We all travel with emotional baggage. It’s impossible to get rid of it. It becomes part of who we are. It is however, possible to learn to recognize it and to become capable of claiming it more quickly. It is even possible to learn to pack lighter, to end up with a few, small-sized pieces of matching luggage. If you work diligently and reflect honestly you might even be capable of going through life with a single carry on bag. But that bag can still wreck havoc in your life if you refuse to claim it as your own.
Our baggage shouldn’t be surprising to us. We act out its contents of fears and anxieties in a familiar fashion again and again. Those who love us or who have come to be annoyed by us could surely tell us the symptoms we display as a result of lugging our particular baggage through life, but we need to recognize more than just these symptoms. We need to rifle through the contents and identify the fears and anxieties hiding inside. We must become so familiar with them that we are able to recognize them no matter what form they choose to take in our lives. Eventually we need to intentionally choose how we want to respond the next time our baggage gets jostled.
Most of us respond in an automatic manner to protect ourselves from the fears and anxieties packed inside our baggage. Locking them in doesn’t make them go away, it makes them instead frantic to escape. Sometimes, it can take as long as a year or two for us to recognize that one of these unfortunate knee jerk responses was a bad choice. We finally stop vehemently defending what we’ve done and realize we allowed ourselves, once again, to be negatively influenced by the dark fears we have locked inside our baggage.
As we begin to reflect on the choices we make and attempt to be more intentional, it may eventually take only a few months after the fact for us to recognize we’ve let our baggage spill into our lives once again. Hopefully, we’ll eventually start to notice our own patterns of behavior and begin to self-correct mere weeks or days after a baggage-spilling incident. Finally, one magical day, we’ll open our mouth to speak, but before we do, we’ll recognize our baggage spinning on the baggage claim carousal in our minds and choose to refrain from letting it dictate the course of our lives.
