What's In Your Suitcase?

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and

you will call it fate." — Carl Jung

I've spent a lot of time in airports over the years. And somewhere along the way, I started noticing things I used to walk right past.

Tourists dragging bags clearly packed for a month-long expedition. Business travelers somehow managing carry-ons and coffee while talking on their phones. And families at bag check surrounded by so many bags, so many items, so much stuff, that you had to wonder: what exactly did they think they were going to need?

I have absolutely been that person.

I learned this the hard way, by the way. One time on a trip to New York, my suitcase was so big and so heavy that I had to recruit a co-worker to help me get it on and off the subway. Hey, a girl needs options, right?

So when I found out about a garage sale being held in a commercial parking garage near the airport a few weeks ago, I was genuinely curious. They were letting people in a few at a time, and the line was already out the door when I arrived. As I stood in line, I saw people streaming out of the garage with items like monogrammed luggage, carts filled with sporting equipment, and bags of clothing. Once inside, I was confronted with rows of tables with mounds of neck pillows, boxes of sunglasses thrown together in no particular order. Electronics that had clearly spent their last moments forgotten in seat pockets. Pet carriers. Strollers, books, too many to even begin to count.

And then the walkers. Not one or two. Dozens of them.

I said it out loud to no one in particular. "Who leaves a walker behind?"

The more I wandered through that garage, the stranger it felt. All of these things that had, at some point, been essential. Packed deliberately. Carried through every checkpoint, loaded and unloaded and carried again, through terminals and gates and connecting flights and the entire exhausting journey of getting from one place to another. And then just, somehow, left.

I thought about that word. Essential. The things we decide we cannot travel without.

We do the same thing in our relationships, don't we? Not with suitcases, but we pack just as deliberately, just as carefully. I don't mean the hopeful things, the intentions, the genuine desire to get it right this time. I mean the things at the bottom. The ones that were packed for us long before we were old enough to have any say in it.

The certainty that our needs are negotiable and everyone else's are not. The habit of managing everything quietly so no one else has to feel the weight of it. The belief, absorbed so early it became invisible, that love is something we earn, and we had better not stop earning it. We didn't choose those things. They were folded in carefully by people who were carrying the same things themselves, handed down like heirlooms nobody ever actually wanted.

The thing about that kind of luggage is you stop noticing how heavy it is. It just becomes the weight of things. And somewhere in year five or year fifteen or year thirty, you find yourself exhausted in a way you can't quite name, and the last thing you think to check is what you've been hauling since you were eight years old.

Here's the thing about that garage. Nothing in it had vanished. It had just been waiting, unclaimed, for someone to finally come along and decide what it was worth.

I keep coming back to the walkers. To whoever left them there, boarded the plane, and went on. Maybe they had a spare. Maybe someone was waiting at the other end with one. Maybe they just decided, at some point between the gate and the door, that they were done.

So, what's in your suitcase? What did you pack so long ago, it just feels like you now? What are you still carrying through every new chapter that belongs to a version of you who simply didn't have better information yet?

Some things were never meant to make the whole journey.

Love & light,

Michèle