When I picked up my daughter to take her to the airport and flight home to the Gold Coast, she was carrying just a handbag. Hold the bus. You’ve spent two weeks in Melbourne – there has to be something bigger than a handbag?
Sadie shrugged. Nah, that was it. Said she’d been mining stuff that was still stashed in her old Brunswick house. Otherwise, she’d just rotated clothes.
Our baggage, I’ve come to realise, comes in all shapes and sizes.Credit: Getty
“Anyway, you should be rapt. You taught me to always pack light, Ma.”
Physically packing light is one of my few life skills. Hand luggage for six weeks in Europe decades before carry-on was all the rage post-COVID. Weekend in Hobart with knickers, a top and a Kindle shoved in an emerald tote. No weight of fashion decisions or giant bags.
Right now, at a weird time when some of life’s underpinnings are in flux – story for another day – my mission is to avoid preoccupations about the past or anxieties about the future by also trying to pack light in a metaphysical sense.
To box-up emotions or yearnings that feel disruptive or dangerous. To keep it simple, to eat and sleep and move properly and do paint by numbers and hack at the passionfruit vine in the sun and read thrillers.
Life, of course, boils down to a series of finds and losses. We lose faith. Our marbles, money, eyesight. Youth. Our way. Keys, direction, impetus, belief. Beloveds.
Right now, the royal family is losing its lustre thanks to staff shortages. Barnaby Joyce has lost booze. Two Sydney families have lost sons in a hideous way. Bradley Cooper has plain lost it, crying in a lame video over missing Leonard Bernstein despite having never met the composer.
After a lifetime of packing light, I’m embracing emotional baggage
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01.03.2024
When I picked up my daughter to take her to the airport and flight home to the Gold Coast, she was carrying just a handbag. Hold the bus. You’ve spent two weeks in Melbourne – there has to be something bigger than a handbag?
Sadie shrugged. Nah, that was it. Said she’d been mining stuff that was still stashed in her old Brunswick house. Otherwise, she’d just rotated clothes.
Our baggage, I’ve come to realise,........
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