I personally have been made fun of by my friends for carrying so many things around in my backpack, but you never know when you’ll need a deck of Uno® cards or a book on cryptology. I carry multiple books, a bottle of Norwegian formula hand cream for my delicate knuckles and some of the most valuable possessions that I have: hand written notes from people who love me. Not only do I carry around these items in my backpack, but I also carry books that are filled with inspiring words and challenging principals that help to fill me with much needed things that you cannot buy at a store.

When I was in the fifth grade we, we did a class activity that lasted weeks called the Oregon Trail (I died along the way by falling onto a cactus). The first step of our journey to Oregon was planning our supplies. Each passenger had to pick the items they thought they would need most and thought they should bring with them across the country, and it was difficult to decide. We would have to pick between the cattle that would drive our wagons forward and the things that would go inside of our wagons as well. The most successful people were the ones that packed only what they would need.

Every ship holds two different types of cargo no matter the type of ship. There is Luggage, which we will call Baggage, and there are supplies. These two things are on board of every relation-ship when it leaves port for a journey, and they are well worth talking about. You and whomever you are relating with are given the opportunity to change course when you talk about the supplies you need and the baggage that you need to get off the ship. We’ll talk about these two and how you can talk about them too.

Baggage

Baggage comes in all sorts of sizes and shapes, just like luggage. Some people bring a lot of baggage into the relationship, and others barely have any baggage with them when they enter a relationship. Now, when I am talking about baggage, I am talking about emotional hang ups and challenges that a person faces due to their past experiences. This may look like someone having a bad experience with their last boss, or a past love interest, or even someone in a current relationship between a parent and child. Baggage is the hurt that we hold onto, the labels that we have given that damage us, and the unpleasant situations that we avoid because we did not like them the last time around.

Baggage seems like something that you can store in a closet, something that you can hide away and not have to deal with. But I tell you this, Baggage builds up. The longer that it sits, the more that it grows and festers until it becomes something much larger, more stinky, and dirtier than it ever was thought to become and more cumbersome than you ever imagined. Baggage can overflow your cargo bays taking up space for more precious supplies, and can even taint and spoil the supplies you currently house. No baggage can be left out, because Baggage creates Baggage.

The first step in dealing with Baggage is declaring it what it is. This means identifying it with the people you are on the ship with and with whom you are placing the relation-ship’s supplies in danger. When you get your baggage in the open, you begin to air out the mold that has grown in the baggage, giving yourself a chance to begin to remove it from your ship. A warning, Baggage will ruin your supplies if you fail to remove it.

Once you have identified the baggage, it is up to you and whoever else is on the boat to find a spot where you can port and rid yourself of the baggage that you brought. That’s the thing about baggage, you cannot just throw it overboard. Baggage that goes overboard has a way of making it back onto the ship. It is only when it is dealt with properly, worked out of the ship and into a place where baggage can be truly left behind, that your baggage will not follow you back onto the boat.

Supplies

Supplies are a different material from baggage.