Mikes Thoughts

packing and life

Today we pack a too big bag for three days of going. It used to be for a month I would bring a small duffel and a laptop bag. Never worried about packing too much. Or too little. Was easy to just take an amount that would give me days. In Vietnam easy to find laundry service and get done for a low price with next day service. Here in Cambodia just the same. Writing this makes me remember how I packed for a life difference. Way back when I left America behind. It felt like what I was really packing an abundance of were memories. Those moments that glided by and filled up an enormous satchel of experiences. I had decided then I could not carry “it all”. Or even a smaller amount. The material things particularly seemed unnecessary. Like by lightening the life packing I was also lifting a burden. Not erasing it but just letting go.

Too many is not enough

I think this happens with packing. Packing a suitcase or preparing to do something that promises to change a life. We think,

Oh... just one more of those.

And then another. Soon we both burdened with heavy sweaters to wear in Saigon and memories that will hold us or hold us back. Some of both need to be let go. We have finite space in the roller bag but infinite room in our cabinet of memories. That doesn’t mean we should hold onto things that make the carrying heavy. There is this concept of the five stages of grief. It’s no accident we have to traverse the first four that take an inordinate amount of space in our lives to finally reach acceptance. We pack and repack and find ourselves at different points. Sometimes seems I go backwards to an earlier one or skip ahead to another. It really is how life is and how we pack for it. We can hold the things close and somehow believe we will reach the final acceptance thing. But each one carries its own weight. I think by the time we reach acceptance we have been weighed down repeatedly. So whether in our suitcase to be packed for Kampot or when I take a thing out for a walk I seem to carry more than enough.

Pooh says oh bother

I love Winnie the Pooh. There’s something about the life advice from those characters that has always seemed to speak past being a child. Pooh is not terribly smart people would have us believe. I disagree. There is wisdom in simplicity and perhaps he learned way back when to skip ahead in the stages. Not be burdened with anger or denial when he could just go straight to acceptance. Forget all those other steps. Deny the denial.

For this mere mortal I feel it’s a hard final step to reach. Yet Pooh does it effortlessly. It’s all about the hunny. Reaching his stages is about knowing. Knowing how to just move beyond and go from the roller bag to the memories.

I’ll go home and pack a few things. I’ll let a few things slip by. I cannot be the vessel for them. Tired of both holding them and worrying over them. Some family memory somewhere in some other country. I tell myself it’s okay to say

Oh bother

And then walk beyond the things. That’s difficult when I get older. More and more things happened. Less and less time to go. It’s the reason I needed Southeast Asia though. A place where some final acts of life are less burdened. More open to actors of change. Everything in America is set. What you have. What you get. What it costs to have and get more. We are obsessed with more.

The biggest freedom is one I learned in meditation. Merely saying,

Not now. I’ll deal with it later.

That let me decide to just not. That’s some acceptance there folks.

And yeah

This wanders all over. The words dance from packing to go to packing for life. The undercurrent is change. All the things touch change. How we all deal with it. How my wife fears it at times. What I need is the ability to just let more go. To find acceptance with how many pair of socks I bring for walking and the discordant memories that sometimes crowd in. So where in all this blogpost is the thing. The one thing.

Easy. There ain’t one. There’s just a bunch of little things that I crowded together. It becomes more difficult to shake some things loose. Some are pernicious and want a half life. But like a character in some novel I read once said,

Standing still is moving backwards where time is concerned

Who ever wants to just stand still. Who wants to move backwards. I’ll bring one less pair of socks and I’ll try to let some things in my memory bucket go too.

This was all over the place. Sorry. Not sorry. This is how this blog works.