The topic of baggage has been brought up on several occasions.  I am working on the train case and M is working on the backpack. Neither of us what the 23 piece luggage set from Darjeeling Limited.

I recently saw Up in the Air with my Yenta (yes, I have a Yenta now).  I will save you from the details since I don’t want to clog this post up with spoiler alert warnings.  I will say that the film was brilliant.  But what else would you expect from the man that gave us Juno and Thank You for Smoking.

Back to the backpack…

George Clooney’s character (the lovable asshole), is a motivational speaker.  His pitch is about a backpack (I am still trying to figure out if the backpack speech has anything to do with the book by John Bytheway.)

How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack.

He gets you to think about what you want to carry around.  Do you feel the weight?  Do you feel the straps digging into your shoulders? Then he asks you to set the backpack on fire.  What things do you save?

As a homeowner I am realizing the amount of useless crap one can acquire over time.  I have started purging the unnecessary items in the hopes of selling my house and moving somewhere smaller in the next year.

Part two of the speech deals with people (no, he doesn’t ask you to set them on fire)…

Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.

As much as we hate to admit it people are sharks.  For the most part, many of us are competitive and looking to get to the top of the food chain. Granted many of us have been able to adapt to less shark-like behavior, but it is still there (I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing).  Hopefully the people in your backpack are people that that don’t hold you back.  They inspire you to be a better person, to go for the gold, to move with purpose.

So, over the next few days think about what is in your backpack.  I am still taking inventory of what’s in mine.