Baggage Check

I recently returned from a quick trip to NYC. As do so many others, I determined to carry my bag on the plane to avoid the checked baggage fee.

With both incoming and outgoing flights, I was in the last boarding group. In both cases, the flights were full and the gate agent suggested those of us boarding late might want to gate-check our bags. I decided to do so, and so prepared to enter the airplane with only a small backpack.

But few others heeded the call. I watched, somewhat bemused, as passenger after passenger approached the ramp loaded with bags, and wondered at all the stuff we think we need in order to travel. Especially on the first flight, a lot of those bags still ended up where mine did: in the luggage hold of the plane.

I made a decision long ago that when I travel, I would not ever pack a bag so heavy I could not lift it myself. In the last year, I also divested myself of many of my possessions–I now own about 1/3 as much “stuff” as I did one year ago.

The lightness feels good. I’ve found that such a purging has also affected my spiritual and emotional life. So many of the hurts and anguishes of the past that used to torment me have now simply become my friends or have dissipated into unneeded memories.

To have made peace with the past and to find pleasure in the moment has been freeing beyond words. In other words, I have learned to practice presence and to ask these questions of my soul:

At this very moment in time, how am I? Right now, not a second later or a second earlier, how am I doing? Do I even know, or am I so wrapped in yesterday’s grudges and tomorrow’s fears that I cannot be actually present and know myself?

It seems that few of us practice presence. Our minds churn with endless chatter over what we face next. Our emotions nurture painful pasts. And today, anything even approaching a moment of simply being is almost always intentionally interrupted by needing to check an electronic device of some sort.

Can we stop?

Are we alive? Can we take air in? Sense the beats of our hearts? Relax our muscles?

Can we breathe in the rhythms of the universe for a while? Can we mentally let the incoming and outgoing tides gently wash our feet while gracefully receiving the water and feeling the sand and the sun?

Let us stay there and savor it. Consider that the present moment contains all we have. It is in that moment, the present, that we live. Our worries take us into tomorrow. But we only live in this day–and in this minute.

No future actually exists. Only what exists is now. What we do in the now determines our next “now.”

But the idea of future is a human construct. And the fear of it destroys our souls.

God is present with us only in the now. God is present in all “nows.” All our “nows,” those we see as past and those we fear as future, are actually present in God, for there is no linear time in that Holy Eternity. But rarely do we acknowledge that. We’re too busy focusing on the not real, i.e., the future, to appreciate the real, the present, the now.

Take what sits in front of us. Let us enter into the work or play or rest as one knowing only that moment, not the to-do list that revolves endlessly through our minds, actually matters. Just that moment. How can we live most freely, most fully in it?

Too many of us are consumed by past anguishes, hurts and miseries and too fearful of the future and the unknown that we simply miss the glory of the moment. We’re carrying far too much baggage on the airplane of life.

And to do that means missing the glory of God and the fullness of our humanity.