Your Baggage Comes With You
I must admit, I had visions of this adventure being a panacea. I dreamed it would naturally smooth all my rough edges. I live a blessed life, but like all humans, I have my struggles. Unexpected days of depression and feeling trapped. Stress and anxiety. Parental/professional/personal feelings of “not-enoughness. A Round-the-World Trip seemed like a salve for all the recurring challenges. Surely, I will overcome my feelings of entrapment and depression when I am travelling to a new country each week. I can’t possibly feel stressed when I no longer have a job. I’ll definitely be a more attentive parent when I am teaching my kids school every day.
After 113 days on the road in 11 countries, I have come to one resounding conclusion: your baggage comes with you. After an initial honeymoon period, I found my usual patterns beginning to reemerge. Instead of being stressed about work, I worried over travel plans. I enjoyed time with the kids, but felt guilty when I longed to be alone. I had days of absolute joy, but other days I felt down, lethargic, and apathetic despite amazing surroundings. Could it possibly be true that travelling itself was not enough to turn me into a relaxed, better looking, creative, always-happy person? Darn you Instagram, you lied to me!
In my prior life, each difficult emotion had its trusted rationalization or response. If I felt trapped and anxious, it was because our house was too small (head to Redfin to daydream). If I felt depressed, I would unconsciously transmute to blame or anger. If I felt stressed by work, I would carve out a few hours on a Sunday to get “caught up.” Looking back through the lens of our new life, I can see the predictability of these patterns so clearly. Each difficult emotion had a patterned response for escape or deflection. I was always running away from the feelings I feared.
When I realized that my baggage had surprisingly joined me on this journey, I came to understand that the opportunity was the change in context. The same feelings cycle through, but my trusted defense mechanisms no longer make sense. I can’t blame my house, my work, or anyone else. It has been a call to move beyond the reflexive responses and open to the discomfort underneath. As Pema Chodron explains in Comfortable with Uncertainty, when we lean into instead of away from painful emotions, we “shake up and ventilate our self-justification and blame… in so doing, our habits become more porous.”
Am I cured of all my hang ups? Absolutely not! Has my emotional armor become more porous? Definitely. My goal is to consciously let sunlight into those pores and wait for wholehearted ways-of-being to sprout.
So if you are pondering a big life change (a new house, new career, new adventure), embrace the reality that your baggage will probably join you too. However, you might be blessed with a few new cracks and as Leonard Cohen so beautifully explained:
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Sunrise at Murchison Falls, Uganda
