Time to sort out your baggage

Yesterday I had a chat with one of my team members. At some point of the conversation, I encouraged this team member to set down the baggage they were carrying with them. “You don’t have to always carry your baggage around. You have the choice to put it down and free yourself of the weight”, I said in good faith.?

I was reflecting on this conversation today morning when serendipity stuck and I heard the same analogy being used in a Rethinking Podcast between Adam Grant and Yuval Noah Harari of Sapiens fame. Yuval used the analogy in a much more poignant way and it helped me rethink my conversation, my advice to the team member and my own approach to “baggage” slightly differently. Penning down my reflections on the subject.

Everyone has baggage - Baggage in colloquial parlance is generally considered negative. “I don't want to hire her, she comes with a lot of baggage”. “I can’t enter into a relationship at this time with all this baggage”. I haven’t researched when baggage became a bad thing. As humans, don’t we spend a lifetime wanting, aspiring, fighting for things? In a quest to gather these “material” things, don’t we also gather non-material ones - emotions and experiences, tears and smiles, learnings and fulfillment? Isn’t our baggage a sum total of all of these things? So why does one year of poor performance trump two decades of good ones? Why does one ugly fight with a loved one outweigh the countless moments of laughter? Why does one embarrassing slip exceed in relative size to a reasonably confident existence? Why can’t all constituents of our baggage occupy space and mass relative to their cumulative impact over time? This negative bias, also known as positive negative asymmetry, is a result of evolution, where paying keen attention to negative, dangerous experiences could be a difference between life and death. Most situations we face nowadays have nowhere near the direness of consequence but our brains haven’t evolved. So some things in our baggage weigh unduly more than others.

Baggage capacity is finite - While the baggage we are discussing is not bound by physical laws, we certainly experience capacity constraints, both mentally and emotionally. Some things need to be thrown out (a choice) or disappear (a factor of time, age, priorities) to make space for new memories, new emotions, new experiences. The size of the baggage may remain more or less the same, but the contents vary throughout your life.

Baggage occupies space - As I reflected on my conversation with my team member, I remember telling them - you can keep your luggage down. It struck me today that even if the baggage is down, you can still see it. Not just you, your family, your loved ones, those who share space and life with you can see it. And given it is indeed metaphorical, they also experience it with you, sometimes to the same or higher degree than you do yourself.?

You can repack your baggage - The fact that you will gather baggage as life goes on is inevitable. What you do with that baggage, however, is a choice. You can be a?

• Hoarder who hoards everything and allows your baggage to consume you.?
• Locker who separates the baggage from your daily life and locks it away.?
• Organizer who repacks your baggage by choosing what you want to keep and what you want to discard.?
• Adapter who tailors different pieces of baggage to suit the situation and constantly recycles the contents of the baggage

Baggage can be good - While baggage can weigh you down, baggage can also make you resourceful. You can carry a very heavy backpack with all the tools in the world but if you don’t know how to use them they won’t be of much use to you. Similarly, you can have all these experiences - both joyful and painful, but if you haven’t distilled the learnings from them which you can use in the future, carrying around the experience is burdensome, rather than propelling.

This reframing of the concept of baggage is useful in most circumstances. While it is not easy to be an organizer or adapter of baggage, if we start with acknowledging that baggage is not necessarily a negative concept, it would be a great start to dealing with baggage. And if we dig into our baggage we may be pleasantly surprised at what we find in there.