Open your suitcase or unzip your backpack – what do you see? What’s in your baggage that you truly need and want and what is excess? Do you see lack of forgiveness? Even toward yourself? What about unthinking ‘disorganization’? Is there yesterday’s pain? Maybe you have un-success (which is different from ‘failure’)? What are those unresolved problems, issues that you continue to pack?
Personally, I believe that the lack of forgiveness – especially of self – is the biggest consumer of space. If you’ve repented, sought forgiveness, then move on. Get over yourself! Lighten your load and make space for those things that are self affirming. Are you fearful of making the same mistake again? Shouldn’t be if you learn from previous experience. Maybe you’re concerned of simply making mistakes… will you? Probably. We all do since it is part and parcel of living and growing. But what advantage is there to standing still? Living is a growing process and mistakes can be the building blocks of that growth.
When you consider the other items in your luggage that really have no value, why are you continuing to carry them? Because if you are then you are also assessing a value to these items. What do you learn from carrying pain? Or from carrying yesterday’s mistakes? Or in continuing to hold onto those things that no longer are an aid in your journey? Familiarity? A kind of… knowing the enemy you know rather than allowing something new to emerge if you let those things go. Absolutely… you will discover new things that might trip you up, but you don’t add to those ‘familiar’ things in your luggage.
I realize that I do tend to ask those uncomfortable questions and even restate them in a different way but that’s only to help to make certain that your journey is all that it can be – for you. In this case… perhaps if you rid yourself of those ‘items’ you really don’t need you will have room for those things that can’t be packed because of them… such as: adventure, joy, discovery, happiness, learning, etc. Those items are well worth packing because they all enhance who you are and allow you to continue on your path to becoming!
