Everyone’s got baggage. And I’m not talking about the stuff hiding in the closet that you take out for vacations, either. I’m talking the stuff that’s in your head: your belief systems, your knowledge, your past. Why do I call it baggage? Because someone puts a tag on it, sends it to some unknown location and you never see it again.
Okay, technically, the baggage stays with you, but it affects your life to a degree that most people wouldn’t expect. Think about fire for a moment. (Calm down, pyros, lemme make my point here.) What do you know about fire? If it weren’t for your past, you’d know almost nothing. It’s warm, it flickers, it turns funny colors. That’s about it.
How do you know it burns things? You read it in a book, someone told you or you’ve seen it happen. You put your hand close to a fire and it got burned, something along those lines. Without any of that in your head, you won’t know any better and you’ll stick your hand back in the fire.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie Memento, but it helps demonstrate some of what I’m talking about. The movie plays a scene, then jumps back in time a couple minutes and you see what led up to that scene. When you don’t have a frame of reference from the past, you interpret the present a lot differently.
Thus, your baggage. Your frame of reference. How you interpret your experiences is based almost entirely on what’s happened in the past. If you can get rid of that baggage, if it’s possible to truly live life moment to moment, imagine how many possibilities open up.
Pushing old ladies into the street and kicking puppies isn’t bad because you don’t know what bad is. (Truth is, it’s a lot of fun! Uh… that’s what I’ve been told, anyway.) Helping old ladies across the street and skritching puppies may not be as rewarding because you don’t know it’s good. You don’t have the boundaries and guidelines that you’ve already created.
You’re not limited by your past, you’re not aiming toward your future. You’re simply doing things here and now. It’s a freeing prospect, but you might want to keep it under wraps to a degree. If you completely wipe out your past, you’ll end up like the guy from Memento. Or you could fly on the wrong airline and lose your actual baggage, too.
Honestly, I don’t think “living life moment to moment” at its most extreme is even possible. If you don’t know you need to breathe, your body will eventually do it for you after you pass out, but if you don’t know you need to eat or drink… you’re screwed.
But suppose you can leave some of your inhibitions behind, forget about bad things that have happened to you and “Start from Square 1”. Without having that past experience holding you back, imagine what you could achieve. You’re not afraid to talk to people (especially the ones you’re attracted to), you’re not afraid of speaking in front of a crowd, you’re not afraid of job interviews. You’re not afraid of any of those things because you don’t know that anything bad could happen as a result. You’re just doing it. You’re just living in that moment.
Sounds pretty inspiring, doesn’t it? And because of this blog entry’s inspiring message, I’m going to give it a shot. I’ll ditch my baggage, go out and talk to a really attractive women. And then push her into the street.
