It has been exactly one month to the day since I’ve attempted to write anything aside from an occasional email. I don’t know if I was in a slump, or if I just didn’t feel I had anything particularly interesting to say. Either way as I dressed for work this morning, a topic suddenly popped into my mind, and once again my words began forming cohesive thoughts and opinions based upon my own life experience and what I’d learned along the way.

Looking back, as a parent of two young adults, I remember wanting my children to find a partner in life that brought little in the way of baggage into the relationship. With so many odds already stacked against them, it seemed far more prudent to wish for a clean slate in order to hedge their bets for a successful union. It’s not that I held anything against someone who had been previously married or even one who already had children, but knowing how green my two were in the ways of the world, I just wished to protect them from the potential liability that naturally exist in someone who had once loved, then made a commitment and still ended up broken.

When I had been their age, I was far too foolish to think about such practicalities. Having always allowed my heart to dictate my actions, I was naïve enough to believe that love conquered all, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Sometimes love ends up being the first casualty of war when incompatibilities predictably collide, thus resulting in the ultimate test of wills designed to declare a winner – when in the end – nobody wins and everyone loses. All I wanted was to protect them from the same kinds of heartache I had suffered. However – in the end – they had to make their own choices, because as I now know all too well we don’t get to choose who we love. Sometimes cupid’s arrows strike and as the saying goes …. the rest is history.

But now many years later, I’ve come to look at baggage very differently. Once you make it into your forties, whether you’ve opted for marriage – sometimes more than once – or not, you’ve probably suffered enough relationship woes along the way to have collected a rather nice set of luggage. In fact, my collection is so extensive I could travel around the world with train cases and steamer trunks loaded with enough wardrobe choices that I’d never have to wear the same thing twice, which is a rather predictable tendency when you constantly allow your emotions to rule over better judgment, but at least my luggage was Louis Vuitton …..

On a much more serious note, to me having baggage just means you’ve embraced life in a manner designed to live it out loud as opposed to only observing it from the sidelines for fear of being hurt. You have loved and you have lost and hopefully you have learned something along the way. You’ve allowed yourself to grow as a human being by discovering the priceless lessons embedded in concepts like forgiveness, as well as compassion for those whose bad choices might have inadvertently caused suffering. You’ve learned there’s beauty behind character lines and experience is something you cannot teach. Hopefully you’ve learned that refusing to judge others means people are far less likely to judge you, and that there’s a freedom in acceptance that cannot be bought or won on a battlefield. These are the people I try and surround myself with every day, because I find them infinitely more interesting and a real treasure to be around. I am inspired by their stories and through the process of having shared found it easier to forgive my own stupid mistakes.

To grow older doesn’t necessarily mean you have grown up, but to grow up and gain real maturity with aging naturally means you have baggage, and that’s okay. However we as human beings have to stop figuratively dragging that same luggage around with us wherever we go. We would no more wheel a large suitcase designed for extensive travel with us to work or shopping no more than we would while going out to dinner or a movie. Besides being impractical, it would be far too cumbersome to deal with effectively. So why then do we insist upon carrying our emotional baggage wherever we go, particularly into new relationships as if the act of carrying all that weight will somehow manage to protect us from acquiring a new piece to add to our collection?

Wouldn’t it be a far better idea to store it away the same way we do our actual luggage and then bring it out only as needed? Whether caught up in a moment of melancholy or the simple need to remember, we all feel the occasional need to sort through our past and relive certain moments and experiences as a means to remain connected to what brought us to where we are today. It is part of the continuity of life and absolutely necessary in terms of developing techniques for making better, more appropriate choices for the future. All in all I must say I am growing more and more comfortable with who I am, as well as my unique place in the world each and every day, and as a result I experience far more good days than bad.

Looking back there are things I would choose to change if I could, but alas I am as powerless over time and its effects as I am at reading the future. But as a means to exert some influence over that which I can control, I have let go of any residual hurt or bitterness, as well as anguish and resentment and as a result have managed to diminish my impressive collection down to one small carry-on that I keep stored away on the top shelf of my closet. Although I haven’t had the need – either literally or figuratively – to take in down in some time now, I do still take pride in the fact it is a Louis Vuitton.