CHAPTER 2

Unpacking Your Bags

In the film, Up in the Air, the George Clooney character, Ryan Bingham, leads a self-help seminar in which he asks participants to ask themselves the question, “How much does your life weigh?”

He asks them to imagine they are carrying a backpack stuffed with all the stuff they have in their lives. First, the little things — the knick-knacks — and then the bigger stuff, like couches, cars, and home. Afterwards he has his audience move on to the people in their lives — siblings, parents, spouses. All of these go into the imaginary backpack, and Bingham urges participants to feel the weight of this bag and notice how this burden slows them down. He argues that moving is living, and the slower we move, the faster we die. He tells them to rid themselves of the bags’ contents and completely free themselves from human connections. We are not like swans, he says, which carry each other symbiotically over a lifetime. Rather, we are sharks, always moving, ever hungry, essentially alone.

This, of course, is where we as authors diverge from Bingham. While the message he begins with sounds in some ways like our own, the big difference is that Repacking is not about getting rid of everything and starting over with nothing. Rather, as Richard’s experience with Koyie illustrates, it’s a matter of systematically considering what we are carrying through life and assessing whether it’s helping us get where we want to go or not.

Bingham’s initial question is the right one: “How much does your life weigh?” But his solution — get rid of it all — is not. And indeed, we discover, in the course of the film, how desperately lonely Ryan Bingham actually is. He has unpacked his bags, but has never learned how to repack them. That is the process we will explore now, beginning with unpacking.

Unpacking Your Bags: Choices, Choices, Choices

Ever had the airlines lose your luggage?

You know that laminated card they show you with all the suitcase styles? Ever wonder why there are so many different types of baggage? And so many options for packing things away? Ever wonder what type of person carries this style or that? Or what your own bags say about you?

Go into any luggage store. You’ll find briefcases, duffel bags, knapsacks, overnight bags, suitcases with wheels, suitcases with built-in carriers, suitcases with carriers that come off. Fabric choices galore — vinyl, nylon, leather, aluminum, burnished steel, horsehide, alligator, lizard and snake. You can get big, bigger, biggest, small, smaller, and mini, all the way down to tiny little bags that only hold a toothbrush. Whatever you want, wherever you’re going, however you’re traveling, there’s a special bag just for that purpose. When it comes to choosing baggage for a particular journey, the choices are endless.

Of course, the same is true — and to a far greater degree — in our journey through life.

Unfortunately, most of us make our choices quite early on. We come out of school and trade in our bookbag for a brand-new briefcase. We make our choices based on what we see around us and what our needs are at the time. But many people end up carrying this same bag the rest of their lives — long after it has outlived its usefulness.

In this chapter we’ll help you take a look at what you’re carrying. Does it still fit? Has it gotten a little worn around the edges? Is it time to think about visiting your internal luggage store for something new?

Two main questions to consider: Are the bags that you’re carrying still the right ones for where you are going for the rest of your life? And, is your life weighing you down?

The More, the Merrier?

As you begin the process of unpacking and repacking your bags you’ll discover a simple truth that you may already know:

You always start out with too much — although you don’t know it at the time.

Dave tells a story to illustrate:

When I prepared to hitchhike across Canada, at age eighteen, I thought I had my life pared down to the absolute minimum. Everything I owned fit into my backpack … almost. I needed more room for the real essentials: my set of wood flutes, the I-Ching, a brass lockbox that held my ID cards and address book, my journal, my special pen for journal writing, the pouch in which I carried my stash when I had one, my favorite hash pipe, my camera, extra glasses and sunglasses, and the packet of letters from the woman for whose love I was taking this journey in the first place. So I strapped a daypack to the top of the backpack frame, creating a hybrid carrying system that towered over me like a swooping vampire.

Thirty miles north of Toronto, by the side of Canadian Highway #1, I tipped over and couldn’t get up. As I struggled to release myself from the belts and buckles that secured my carrying system to me, a pickup truck pulled over and the elderly farmer behind the wheel offered me a ride. He and his younger passenger, who I soon learned was his son, had a good laugh while I fumbled to separate my two packs so as to lift them into the back of the truck. But they were nice enough to let me ride in the cab with them, which turned out to be a godsend, because we hadn’t gone five miles before the skies opened up and it began to rain torrentially. Unfortunately it was still pouring when they dropped me off at a roadside rest area half an hour later. I splashed around to the back of the truck and dragged out my backpack. The farmer began to pull away. By the time I noticed, he was twenty yards gone and accelerating — and with him my daypack!

I sprinted down the exit ramp after him, waving my arms and screaming like a crazy person. If someone had been watching, I’m sure they would have taken me for the proverbial ax-wielding hitchhiker, but that didn’t stop me. All that mattered at that instant was that my most prized possessions were speeding away from me. The rest of my gear, left soaking in a huge puddle, could have been washed away for all I cared.

As luck would have it, the farmer had to slow for traffic, and I managed to catch up just as he was about to merge onto the highway. He saw my face in his side window and burst out laughing. No doubt I looked hysterical — I was. My vocabulary had been reduced to two words: “Wait!” and “Stop!” but I was getting a lot of mileage out of them, repeating each word in a steady stream at the top of my lungs.

While the farmer and his son slapped their thighs and wiped away tears of laughter, I scrambled back into the rear of the truck and recovered my daypack. I hugged it to my chest with all my might, as if I could squeeze away the terror I’d just experienced. Clutching it like a favorite teddy bear, I plodded back down the ramp towards the rest of my stuff. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t even turn back to thank my ride.

Subsequently it has occurred to me that the experience was a pretty good example of how I have too often operated. I’ve weighed myself down with so much stuff that I haven’t been able to enjoy the trip I’m on. Instead of taking care of myself, I spend all my energy taking care of my stuff. And then, typically, in times of transition I pay so much attention to the heavy part of my load that I neglect life’s treasures, which then, of course, tend to disappear off into the distance. Only if I’m really lucky — or scream really loud — do I have any chance of ever seeing them again.

The “Packing Principle”

There seems to be a “Peter Principle” when it comes to stuff — whether that stuff fills a knapsack or a lifestyle, whether it’s freeze-dried food packages or important responsibilities at work. The “Peter Principle” says that people in an organization rise to their level of incompetence — they keep getting promoted until they end up in a job they can’t do effectively.

Most of us, in our lives, accumulate baggage by the same principle. We keep adding things and responsibilities until we get to a point where we can’t carry them any more.

It’s the “Packing Principle.”

What, then, is the solution? There are two parts to it.

First, decide how much you’re really willing to carry. And second, decide what goes and what stays.

Ultimately, it comes down to a series of trade-offs. What are you willing to trade in one area of your life to get what you want in another? The unpacking process is a matter of reviewing what you have and considering each item in light of the trade-offs you have to make to keep it.

Probably the most common response we have heard from readers of earlier editions of Repacking is the initial reaction they share upon finishing the book. Scores of people have told us how they immediately went to their closets and dressers and began digging through and separating out stuff they no longer felt they needed. Old shoes, forgotten books, broken kitchen appliances go into bags and boxes for second-hand stores or the landfill. We’ve heard stories from folks who have emptied out shelves — and even rooms — that they’d avoided dealing with for years. This literal lightening of the load is a kind of catharsis for many of us. It’s a way of visually comprehending previously unexamined aspects of our lives. And sorting through this stuff is a strategy for jump-starting the deeper process of unpacking and repacking our lives in the metaphorical sense.

Thus, we encourage readers of this edition of Repacking — if so moved — to dive into just one closet or dresser before deciding whether to go on an unabashed cleaning binge. But don’t stop there. Once we’ve unpacked the stuff in our lives it’s time to unpack our lives themselves.

If you’d like to take a more systematic approach to doing so, you might now turn again to the Repacking Journal and complete The Good Life Checklist. Alternatively (or having finished it), you might continue wondering about what you really, really need in life.

The One Thing I Really, Really, Really Need

In the movie, The Jerk, Steve Martin plays an idiot who, through pure dumb luck, strikes it rich by inventing a special handle for eyeglasses. He becomes phenomenally wealthy and indulges himself with a brand-new mansion full of consumer goods. Soon of course, his life goes down the tubes — his personal relationships fall apart, his self-esteem crumbles, and finally, in a classic scene, he staggers through his house, getting ready to leave for good, boasting that he doesn’t need anybody or anything. But he can’t completely let go. He picks up a chair, an article of clothing, a vacuum cleaner.

“I don’t need anything!” he bellows. “Except this … and this … and this … ”

By the time he is walking out the front door of his home, he’s draped in all kinds of things, with furniture and appliances hanging off every limb. And because it’s Steve Martin, he’s also got his pants around his ankles.

It’s like this for many of us (except for the pants part) as we prepare to unpack and repack. We approach the process thinking “I don’t need nothin’,” but before we know it, we’re groaning beneath the weight of all the things we can’t live without. Here, then, is a conversation prompt to get you thinking about the one — and only — thing you really, really, really need. Sharing this with a Repacking Partner will also help you test out whether what you think you need is what you really need.

Go through your home, mentally or physically, until you’ve come up with the one thing you really, really, really need. For example, if there were a fire, what item would you grab first? Keep in mind that the “one thing” doesn’t necessarily have to be a valuable possession. It might be a treasured photograph, an unpublished novel you’re working on, or even your favorite coffee cup.

Ask yourself why this item is so important to you, and see if you can’t draw upon this reflection to come up with a principle for why the things that matter to you matter so much. If possible, talk about this with your Repacking Partner and use it as a way to develop some additional guidelines for what you want to continue carrying, and for what you can now leave behind.

Four Reasons for Carrying

When you get right down to it, there are four main reasons why you might be carrying what you’re carrying. You can break this down into two scales, and create a matrix to help identify where you stand.

One scale is a continuum between current enjoyment and future payoff. We either do something because we enjoy it, or we expect to get something down the road.

The other scale is a continuum between self and others. We either do something for ourselves, or we do it to help others.

Combining these yields the four categories. So you might be carrying what you’re carrying because:

• You enjoy it now for the pleasure it gives you.

• You enjoy it now for the pleasure it gives others.

• You are willing to put up with it now for something it will provide you in the future.

• You are willing to put up with it now for something it will provide others in the future.

An example of the first category might be a job, hobby, or pastime you really love doing. For instance, you may have no problem getting up at 6:00 a.m. on a cold winter day to go skiing.

In the second category, consider something like hosting a party. It might be tons of work for you, but you enjoy it because it’s fun for people you care about.

A good example of the third category is physical exercise. You may hate your aerobics class or detest swimming laps, but you do it because you know that afterwards you’ll feel better for it.

Into the fourth category falls a lot of people’s work. You may not be crazy about your job — you may not even like it at all — but you do it because you have a family to support, or because you want to someday pay for your children’s education.

Obviously, in all four of these categories, there’s some overlap. For example, you may enjoy some aspects of your job while you’re doing them, and put up with others because they may eventually lead to something else. The point of recognizing these categories is not to go through your life and pigeonhole everything you do into one or another. It’s simply to help you see that the answer to the question, “Why the #@&%! am I carrying it?” is not that complicated. You can, with a little introspection, develop a pretty clear sense about why you’re doing what you’re doing — why you’re carrying what you’re carrying.

And more importantly, this prepares you for doing something about it. It sets you up either to lighten your load, or steel yourself for the burdens you’ve chosen. Because there are really only two things you can do. You can either keep carrying, or stop carrying.

What most of us do, though, is vacillate. Or whine. If we feel that something’s weighing us down — a relationship, a job, the burdens of home ownership — we’re usually not willing to just let it go. At the same time, we’re often unable to accept the burden as a choice and change our attitude about it. We don’t take the time to do what Richard did with the items in his backpack: decide if we really want to be carrying them, and, if the answer is “yes,” to carry them as happily as possible.

Human beings have a remarkable ability to persevere if we have a reason for doing so. History is filled with stories of men and women who bore incredible hardships in the name of a cause or a concern they believed in. On the other hand, most of us have a hard time flossing regularly because it hardly seems worth the trouble.

When we unpack and repack, a good deal of what we want to do is simply to decide what’s worth the trouble. And then, having decided that something is worth it, own that choice — take responsibility for it — and bear the burden (if it still feels like one) with as much good humor as we can.

The Weight of Success

The more we do, the more responsibilities we have, the heavier our loads tend to be — and the more important it is that we ask ourselves why we’re carrying what we’re carrying. And yet, it is just when we need most to ask ourselves this question that we find it most difficult. We’re too busy, too weighed down by success to stop and reflect.

Ironically, the most important issues in our lives — work, love, place, and purpose — are also usually the most difficult to deal with. And the problems with which we need the most help are the hardest to ask for help with.

All around us, help is available — but we don’t avail ourselves of it. Side-by-side on the bookstore shelves, row after row, are books — self-improvement, poetry, autobiography, history, nature — that encourage us to inquire about the meaning of our journey through life. To scratch even the surface of the wisdom contained in these volumes, a person would have to retreat from the world to study full-time. The only way we could ever possibly get these messages about life would be to withdraw from it.

The paradox shouldn’t come as a surprise. Life is full of riddles that can only be solved by living them. As Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

Often it takes a “wake-up call” of one sort or another — a job loss, the death of someone we love, a significant health challenge — to get us thinking about our problems. And unfortunately, due to the effects of the wake-up call, we’re often much less able to deal effectively with the problems than we would be normally.

It’s essentially a matter of feeling lost, of not knowing where to go next. Or, as Richard learned recently from a well-respected alpine tour guide named Daniel Sundqvist, of essentially “not knowing which way is up.”

Daniel leads hiking and skiing trips in the European Alps for Ryder-Walker Alpine Adventures. When Richard and his wife, Sally, had the privilege of following Daniel’s superb leadership through deep snow in the birthplace of skiing, Arlberg, Austria, he filled them in on what to do in the case of an avalanche.

Virtually no one out-skis an avalanche, he counseled. If you’re caught in one, the first thing to do — counter-intuitively — is take off your skis. If you leave them on you’ll get anchored in place, and be unable to escape. But once you’ve abandoned them you’re in a position to plan an escape.

As soon as the snow stops moving, said Daniel, you need to confront the inevitable claustrophobia of being buried beneath it. First, create an air space around your mouth, by clearing away the snow and cupping your hands. Then, spit.

Why spit?

Daniel explained: So you know which way is up. You can depend on the law of gravity to tell you which way to start digging. It’s not unprecedented for skiers buried in an avalanche to become so disoriented that they actually dig themselves deeper in a fatal attempt to extricate themselves. Had they only employed Daniel’s simple trick, they might have survived.

Often, it’s such simple steps that make all the difference when, in life, we feel all but buried alive, when we figuratively, if not literally, don’t know which way is up.

Many times, we become so wrapped up in the complexity of things that we fail to take the first simple steps that lead to success, or even survival. Letting go of things that weigh us down, making space to breathe, figuring out which way to start digging — these are all simple steps that, when taken, increase our odds of finding our way to a safe place and achieving our goals and objectives.

The evidence is pretty persuasive that most of us — even the most successful of us — will go through periodic “wake-up calls” — when we feel as if we are carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. Surprisingly, we realize that our world is different than we perceived it. As Rollo May put it in The Courage to Create, “Emergence is often experienced by the individual as emergency, with all its attendant stress.”¹

In other words, “wake-up calls” wake us up.

Richard talks about his own series of wake-up calls.

Many years ago, I thought of myself as a journeyman adult. I had come into my own. I was confident. I was settled. I was successful, comfortable in my way of life. Surprisingly — to me — everything skidded to a halt. A series of wake-up calls shifted my mental furniture around and permanently rearranged it. First one, then a second parent died. I divorced. A work partner died. My son left for college. My world caved in. I had to tunnel out.

My father was only 68, and we never had a chance to say good-bye to each other. He was struck by a catastrophic physical event — a massive coronary while walking in the skyways of downtown St. Paul. Everyone told me that he didn’t suffer; there wasn’t any time. The emergency crew and the doctor who happened to be nearby agreed.

My father disappeared, taking with him my past and his future. I was struck by the feeling that by dying so young, he had aged me overnight. A new person crawled out, weighted down with heavy bags of sadness. I decided I had to repack for my own future.

Eleven years later my mother died in my arms at 78. We did have a chance to say good-bye to each other. With her death, the generational curtain was flung open completely. I no longer had any protection from the raw edge of total responsibility for my life. I had no choice but to unpack and repack.

After her death I looked in the mirror. I saw a kind of adolescent in midlife — in some ways no different from what I was at 18 — confused and frightened, yet amazed and excited by my life. With the same sense of longing for distant places, the same wild curiosities and romantic yearnings. I remember exactly the same feelings when I was 18. The years between 18 and 49 seemed now like moments, not decades.

Risking New Ground

Everyone says good-bye to someone or something at various times in their life. It’s usually not easy, but the letting go of things is a natural part of life. In order to keep moving forward, occasionally we have to leave things behind.

In order to grow we have to deal with the necessary losses, whatever they are — the death of a loved one, a job layoff, divorce, the loss of property, loss of a dream, seeing our children launched. Personally, we have handled such losses with journaling, introspection, and most importantly, dialogue. They’re how we allow the newfound lightness of our load to keep from weighing us down.

In the classic movie, Dead Poets’ Society, Robin Williams plays professor John Keating, who has returned as a teacher to the prep school he attended as a youngster. He tries to introduce the young men of the school to the joys of English literature, and more importantly, to life. Throughout the film, as they struggle with self-discovery, he challenges them to let their true voices speak.

At one point, he leaps up on his desk. “Why do I stand here?” he asks. He answers his own question: “I stand on my desk to remind myself that we must constantly force ourselves to look at things differently. The world looks different from up here. If you don’t believe it, stand up here and try it. All of you. Take turns.”

“If you’re sure about something,” he says as they take turns standing on his desk, “force yourself to think about it another way, even if you know it’s wrong or silly. When you read, don’t consider only what the author thinks, but take time to consider what you think … Risk walking new ground.”

To risk walking new ground is a challenge we face constantly throughout our lives, and never more poignantly than at midlife. Our interviews, experience, and involvement with people at all stages of life have led us to believe that nothing is more important to fulfillment than the willingness to “risk walking new ground.”

Almost everybody harbors a desire to be something other than what they have become. Nearly everyone feels compelled to examine their life and ask, “Why am I carrying all this?”

Our culture has traditionally taught us that shouldering the same load no matter what the circumstances is more honorable than unpacking our bags and letting go. We hang in there because we are conditioned to believe that we are failures if our relationships or jobs end.

In fact, it may be just the opposite. Making that discovery is what repacking is all about.

Unpacking Dialogue Questions

In its major forms, unpacking can be one of the most painful of human experiences. At the same time it can be intensely liberating.

How about you? What are you carrying? Are you in a major period of questioning whether to let go of some place, someone, or something?

Think of a particular situation you’re struggling with. Decide whether it falls under the heading of work, love, place, or purpose.

With that specific situation in mind, reflect on the following questions and prepare to have a courageous conversation with your Repacking Partner about them.

• Place: Can I really expect the situation to be any better somewhere else? How?

• Work: Is what bothers me about this job something I would have only with this job?

• People: What would it take to “unpack my bags” in this relationship? At what point have I thought enough about my situation – at what point is it a mistake to keep “hanging in there”?

• Purpose: Who can I talk with who might help me make more sense of my life?

And one last thing to think about while unpacking:

• What is one thing I really, really don’t need to keep?

Unpacking involves looking at both the good and bad in your life — the ugly, too. As you unpack, you’ll probably be shocked by some of the baggage that weighs you down. There may not exactly be skeletons in your closets, but chances are there will be at least a few things that have seen much better days.