You often don’t realise how heavy your backpack is really until you lay it down after carrying it for way too long. A never ending journey of sorts, like a red-eye flight which gets delayed and you need to keep waiting everywhere. And because you are impatient you don’t sit down at one place with the bag kept on the side. You wear it and keep pacing across all the gates. After a point the pain in your back and shoulders becomes a part of your existence. You continue to live with it. Why do we do this?
I have no idea. Is that why baggage is often used as euphemism? Something that you just lug around until you reach the destination. Often the destination is not a place but perhaps a person. But until then what do you do? You keep pacing. There is a need to keep moving. Rest is for the weak. Rest is for the vain. Rest is for the privileged. For the rest of us, there is no concept of rest. There is only work and pacing about until your shoulders give in or get used to it.
They say pack light. But how do you pack light when your bag is already so full? Is there room for more? Not in this bag, so you carry another bag. Two bags on your shoulders. One you wear in the front, the way some of us are trained to do while boarding the Mumbai local during rush hour. And the other on your back. Both balance the load you fool yourself. You walk and you realise that it will hurt but you know that pain will become a part of your existence soon enough.
Packing light also means to live within lesser means. To leave stuff behind. No addition, only subtraction. This is hard. Letting go is hard. But that’s precisely why you should do it, I guess, For walking through with a lighter load frees you up and lets you fly. Is that why airlines have a limit on the luggage you are allowed to carry? And for every kilo, you are fined heavily. One must be like that, like Vistara which has a zero tolerance to extra luggage. I once paid 9k extra and they offered me a first class “upgrade”. What a joke. But they taught me a valuable lesson of travelling light, and always never by Vistara. I am joking, I went back to them the next month.
I need to become more minimalist in my gear. I often tend to overpack and then struggle. Travelling light is an art which I am yet to master. I often take up too much of everything. Maybe in the times to come, I will learn how to do this and maybe then I will be free, free from the luggage that I have been carrying around. Free at last free at last.