You, me, your mom, dad, lover, barber, mailman, baker… we’re all hoarders and lugers. We lug our baggage around like there’s no tomorrow, snailing along with the whole shebang. If you still regularly think or obsess about something that’s happened more than 18 months ago, you’re stuck. We’re overflowing with useless unproductive harmful cortisol attached to some past emotion or event and our brain keeps going back to it and replaying it, underscoring it with anxiety, sadness , stress, trauma… and in each rummage the pathway to it gets stronger and ourselves more miserable. The body is very practical and there is a psychophysiological response just as the scab you’re picking were a fresh wound, as it is happening now. The body doesn’t distinguish past from present and we can think ourselves into a ditch just like that amongst these old rageddy suitcases. Unpack.

The brain is keeping score of the things that didn’t work out so well, not to torture us on an infinite loop but to try and show us places where we were lacking some information or insight. We don’t remember the past in order to reminisce and fondle it. We remember it so we can do better next time. It’s a learning mechanism warning us and if something keeps coming back, it’s because your unconscious mind knows you haven’t structured it and extracted the lesson yet so it’s blasting you with anxiety in order to make you deal with it. But it’s far too easy to make it a sob story you repeat making you a victim, martyr or accomplice (here you get a hefty dose of shame as well as a bonus ride in personal hell) to “wrong”. Past is not fixed. It’s always retold and rewritten as we grow and mature and more experience equals more wisdom – if you learn to unravel, unpack. Wisdom means making less stupid mistakes if they can be avoided. If you don’t know enough to not make them maybe you need to make them in order to get the lesson. Most mistakes are not fatal. If you tend to your baggage regularly the amount of mistakes will steadily decrease and increase again when you try to learn new things and venture into new areas. That’s all right, we all suck at something before we master it.

So for some self soul therapy  – grab a pen and write. Write autobiographically and reconcile with the things that keep haunting you. You can do it as a journaling thing, take hours at a time and write about your whole experience so far, you can focus on painful memories or split your life into stages and write about those to gain more clarity and structure and see patterns of behaviour that might not be working in your favour. You can unpack little by little handling the small stuff first or go straight to the gaping wound. There is something deeply healing in autobiographical writing. It literally helps you think and restructure. Unsaid remains unprocessed and free to burn its way into your now. Master the places you may not even want to look at. Articulate them. Not knowing how to begin is ok, being at a loss of words is ok, crying is ok, doing it badly is ok. It is not gonna be the next bestseller, this is just for you, private, personal.

Just as when traveling, most of the luggage we hauled from back home out of some fear of lack was left unused and we lived in the now with just a few necessities. We don’t need all that luggage. The larger the clutter the more uncertain and lost we are walking the rooms we have no business being in any more. What’s done is done, what’s gone has passed. Take what is useful for your future and release the rest. Unpack and travel light. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to drag all those heavy things around?