Dear Daughters and Sons who carry Bags,
Some of us carry baggage through our lives and some of us have massive moving trucks crammed full of tea chests. It’s amazing what we think we can’t throw out and what we absolutely must hold on to for dear life. Five years ago we packed up our home to move to the other end of the country. Thinking we’d be back in a year we sold everything we thought we could do without and put everything that was really really really important, that we absolutely had to keep and would simply die without - into storage.
Five years later and we are still at the other end of the country and so a few months ago we paid an outrageous sum of money to have those boxes of important items freighted from the southern end of the Country, where they patiently had waited for us to fill our lives with them again, up over the highways that run the length of the Australia, to us now living in the far north. We filled our lounge room with the boxes of treasures from our past and with great excitement I opened the boxes. It was going to be just like Christmas.
After 5 years I had forgotten what we had packed up and expected to find old friends and lost memories. Instead I opened box after box of junk. There are boxes of MacDonald’s toys that five years ago the kids cherished. Now the only thing they can’t live without is – no not their embarrassing mum - their smart mobile phones. There are boxes of stuffed toys and boxes of well – just crap – like easily replaceable cheap glass ware and board games with missing pieces. I can’t believe we got a second mortgage to move this stuff when most of it is headed straight to the OP shop.
The lesson is clear. What is important to you now what you think you just absolutely impossibly can’t live without or your heart will split open what is upsetting you now and giving you sleepless nights that make your brain churn like a washing machine will be forgotten in 5 years time and replaced with new worries to keep you awake and new treasures to fill you with bliss.