Life Is a Journey. Travel Light

One of the most interesting books I’ve edited is Carry On and Ditch the Excess Baggage by Tiffany Allen. It details the trials and tribulations of the author through a difficult divorce, depression, and breast cancer. She survived it all with an understanding that you just have to let go of emotional baggage. Hence, the title. Carry On has the double meaning of “persisting in spite of” and the small suitcase we’re allowed to bring on a plane with us. If we travel with just a carry-on, we avoid paying extra for checked baggage, waiting at the baggage claim, lugging it around, and possible losing it. Losing it would be a good thing. That’s what Tiffany suggests: Ditch the Excess Baggage.

Many people go through the journey of life carrying excess emotional baggage, all the hurts and trauma from an unhappy childhood, rebellious adolescence, and turbulent adulthood. Some people may have just one bulky suitcase. Others may have two or three, and a few may have several baggage carts full.

In Clearing and Rewiring taught by awarenessnow.com, we accept past and present events with equanimity, letting go of expectations, demands, and attachments to people, places, outcomes, and things. We realize that they are or were exactly as they are or were meant to be, as part of the evolutionary flow of life. Yes, everyone and everything is flowing on a journey as on a river. Some people may be stuck in a swamp while others are joyfully gushing through rapids. Some people may try to go against the flow (see "Row, Row, Row Your Boat") but that doesn’t last for long. So letting go and going with the flow is ditching the excess baggage.

In Hindu philosophy, the term lej avidya means that last bit of attachment a person has to let go of before attaining enlightenment. This doesn’t mean that in order to be enlightened, we have to live like a sadhu in a cave or hut and give up all our worldly possession. It just means that we no longer have attachment to them, we no longer feel upset if we lose money or possession, for we realize, as Detective Sam Spade said in The Maltese Falcon, that it’s all the “stuff that dreams are made of.” This quote is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s lines in "The Tempest" when Prospero, after witnessing a masque ball, declares,

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yeah, all that it shall inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

as dreams are made on; and our little life

is rounded with a sleep.” (4.1.148-158).

Thus, like Prospero, realize that our body, mind, feelings, and ego are “such stuff as dreams are made on” and, like excess baggage, we can let go of our attachment to them, as we journey on the road of life. We can even let go of our carry-on and be so light that we ourselves are carried by the current of life to our ultimate destination, the Ocean of Being.