The Things We Carry

I remember the week before giving birth feeling big and heavy and awkward but not so much that I couldn’t grab a vacuum and clean my house before going into the hospital.  It was instinctual. I wanted to create order before stepping into the new world of having an infant and an eighteen month-old child at home.  

Twenty years later I find myself experiencing a similar urge. This time, however, the impulse to create order has turned into a two-month-long, sustained effort and has come at a time when the light of my mothering days is changing as the light changes in my sun room from dawn to dusk.  My girls, closer to my heart than ever, are now the ones inhabiting nests in various places, as they grow, change and progress through their lives as young adults.

At the beginning of May, I was suddenly possessed by a desire to clear out some of what has come into my home over the years – things I had purchased, things passed down, things given.  I woke up one morning angrily wondering why I had been holding on to so many things that no longer resonate with my true self.   

Anger can be a necessary catalyst for action.  In this case, my anger propelled me out of my more passively-oriented peacemaker archetype and into my more take charge, achievement-oriented self.  A fiery heart endowed me with the energy and physical strength required to lift furniture, paint a table and chairs, and transform cluttered spaces into more orderly ones, reflective of a new phase in my life.

The ritual of holding one object after another in my hands to discern its energy and relevance felt like a ceremony of self-liberation.  I curtailed my usual pattern of merging with people, things and lives in an effort to remember my true self and to carve out space for the flourishing of my own being. 

Day-to-day life can remain chaotic for months at a time, even if that chaos is unseen and experienced internally.  Life has a way of turning into a barrage of responsibilities one wouldn’t necessarily choose but that require an immense amount of effort and attention day after day.  These kinds of life experiences make up the fabric and meaning of our days and might be described as labors of the heart.  The days of our lives can be in turn fulfilling, empty-feeling, inspirational, lethargic, stressful, devastating, wondrous and life-giving, day by day as we go through the tasks and rituals that comprise our lives. 

My pattern is to pray my way through the everydayness of any given challenge or inspiration without worrying too much about the external spaces in my life and with the knowledge that seeking perfection is an elusive and fruitless endeavor.  We negotiate our lives on a wondrous yet chaotic and hurting planet. 

In the contemplative moments that came up during my purging days, I pondered, often with intense emotion, “the things we carry” (and insist upon continuing to carry) during this sojourn here on earth.  I found boxes of teaching materials, as well as notes and syllabi from past classes that I created and taught.  I dumped all of those papers into the recycle bin, realizing that it was time to let them go. What I created even ten years ago feels like incarnations ago, and to hold on to the past will only prevent me from living into and imagining the future. 

I kept my journals, because I was able to see that my journals contain a record of my prayers, dreams, dark nights, and fumbling efforts toward self-knowledge.  To look back at times, as a way to gain insight into the present moment, has been a helpful practice.

I ponder Tim O’Brien’s celebrated novel about Vietnam, The Things They Carried.[i] I do not need to carry my past around with me like a soldier carrying a love letter in his pocket from a girlfriend at home, and I do not need to hoard articles and papers that I’ve collected from old projects and bygone inspirations.  I’d rather do as I used to do when the girls were young, when I turned their backpacks upside down to rid the packs of moldy, crumbly food stuff, bunched up homework assignments, and broken pencils. 

I don’t have to carry the weight of my ancestors (except for the items that I choose to keep) and all of their passed down objects, because mystically speaking they haven’t gone anywhere, and because they are still with me in spirit when they choose to be. They continue to guide and tend to me in ways that I occasionally sense on a clear psychic day. 

We might take time to catalogue the things we carry—psychic traumas, old hurts and grudges, broken hearts from betrayals that happened years ago, letters from people that feel clammy in our hands as we hold them, and so it goes. 

If we hang on to too much psychic and physical weight, we will be blinded to the mundane and the miraculous before our very eyes. We may be too cloudy-headed to receive guidance from the unseen world.  After my purging frenzy, I can see the books on my shelves; I can reach for and find inspiration in a given moment. 

I am grateful for the exhausting, frenetic purging of the last few months.  Dusty containers storing the fruit of past endeavors have been emptied, and new spaces have been created. 

I now carry what I choose to carry. Having emptied my bulging pockets of the soiled papers and dried crumbs of my physical and psychic worlds, I experience, to borrow from Milan Kundera, an (almost) “unbearable lightness of being.” 

Toss, toss, toss. 

[i] O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Broadway Books. New York. 1990.