8. Travel Light or Travel Heavy?

Everyone has baggage in life.

No matter your age, class, race, sex, culture or nationality, if you are a human being - and if you are reading this I am assuming that you are - then over the course of your life you will have developed psychological baggage. And everyone has their unique set of suitcases bequeathed to them by their birth, families, upbringings, schooling, culture, accidents of Fortune, country, historical periods ... In the fields of psychology and philosophy, the official term for “baggage” is conditionings (whether familial, cultural, societal) and sufferings (whether anxiety, fears, depression etc.).

From this universal starting place, human beings then fall into two broad categories: those that deal with their baggage and those that do not. If you wish to build a good life for yourself, then you must make sure to belong to the first category, because as the wise have always known it is pretty much a universal rule that you cannot attain real, and lasting, well-being in the absence of dealing with your baggage.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
– Robert Frost

Thankfully, a big component of philosophy, and psychology, is precisely the process of reducing our baggage and learning how to travel light: this is the high art of deconditioning, or unlearning and dismantling detrimental patterns within us. And when we really begin to gradually and systematically lighten our loads, we journey through life with much more ease, health and well-being, and this makes all the difference.