The
essence of being human is that . . . one is prepared in the
end to be defeated and broken up by life,
which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love
upon other human individuals.
George Orwell
Without
exception, all of us carry baggage, generated by earliest to
early experiences, our first relationships both positive and
negative, attitudes and outlook shaped by geography, economic
circumstance and the accidents of life.
The
much underappreciated Canadian writer Anne Michaels observes:
“We are marinated in our childhoods, in the places of
our earliest memories . . . a child is born in only one place.”
When
we enter a friendship or relationship, we are implicitly agreeing
to take on that special other’s baggage. The success or
failure of most relationships is determined by the gradual discovery
of the contents of the other’s carry on, and then discovering
within ourselves either the ability, willingness and desire
-- or none of the above -- to carry what is there.
Unconditional
relationships predict the heaviest baggage is somehow the easiest
to carry. Be it with a family member or intimate partner, the
momentous, character shaping events will have have long been
assumed and fully integrated into the unspoken rites and rules
that constitute daily interaction. And since our best kept secrets
are not really secrets at all, what would otherwise be the unwieldy
weight of baggage is offset by the unqualified support and succour
that define unconditional relationships. That said, we all know
of family members who aren’t speaking to each other, of
close relationships frequently breaking down under the burden
of baggage.
As
we get older and wiser, we learn to anticipate or look for signs
of what kind of baggage people with whom we are only tentatively
connected carry. Certain forms of eccentric or curious behaviour
often betray defining childhood experiences the carrier is subconsciously
addressing. Among the obvious is the abused child turned into
an abuser adult, or someone addressing abandonment issues via
a craving for special attention. People who are chronically
late for appointments might be revenging defining life situations
over which they were powerless to change, so they flip the power
paradigm on those who traditionally make others wait on them.
People
who make unwise choices in friendships either underestimate
the baggage of the other or their ability to carry it. In certain
instances, one’s inability or unwillingness to carry normal
baggage reflects the negative influence of parents and role
models who couldn’t be bothered to carry their own. Lacking
the mental muscle to forge meaningful connections, these legions
of the damned and damaged flit from one relationship or friendship
to another seeking without what can only come from within.
As
it concerns self-perception and the warping effects of baggage,
there is much to be learned from the antisocial comportment
of loners, many of whom take secret pride in their asceticism.
We often uncritically attribute to the hermit or recluse an
exalted spiritual calling that is inseparable from aspirant's
extraordinary willingness to reject any and all human connection,
when in fact his solitary is a subterfuge that betrays a pathological
fear of revealing, if only to one other person, his baggage
-- the price every relationship ineluctably exacts. The loner,
as tormented as he is inauthentic in his slavish relationship
to public opinion and terrified of having his baggage outed,
instead chooses the punishing unhappiness of the loner’s
life which he then, in a desperate act of self-preservation,
turns into an ascetic virtue. Nietzsche’s analysis of
this sleight-of-mind remains unsurpassed (On the Genealogy
of Morality, 1887).
In
recognition of the pervasive heaviness of collective baggage,
all cultures, without exception, schedule festival days into
their calendar year with the express purpose of obliterating
the neurons that carry our carry on. In notably Brazil and Mexico
(Rio Carnival and Mexican Day of the Dead), it is a tradition
for carnival goers to assume different identities as the means
to the end of escaping the self and the burden of self-consciousness.
Just
prior to Rio festivities, in response to a demand that borders
on frenzy, costume retail outlets pop up like mushrooms after
a warm rain as society ladies hunger to impersonate tarts and
tramps and janitors dream of morphing into judges. But these
Dionysian diversions, however woven into the fabric of the culture,
offer only temporary respite, which leaves the rest of year
and only one viable option for those who, at the end of the
day, are simply unable to manage the contents of their baggage.
On that most delicate and disconcerting of subjects (suicide)
G. K. Chesterton writes: “The thief compliments the things
he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults
everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower
by refusing to live for its sake.” Since, according to
the University of Oxford Centre for Suicides, there are more
than 800,000 suicides per year worldwide, Chesterton, poignant
turn of phrase notwithstanding, has clearly underestimated the
punishing weight on the mind of personal baggage and its manifest
unbearability.
Today,
with the concept of community wearing thinner than ever thanks
to especially computer technology, we can now choose the path
of least baggage resistance because there’s no price to
pay. Having fewer core relationships of shorter duration is
the first effect of fibre optic technologies taking over and
gradually rendering obsolete direct human contact. In search
of the perfect, baggage-light friend or partner, we are gradually
discovering that logging on and off best insure the empowerment
we seek as it concerns our societal relationships. If I’m
convinced that I’m happiest carrying only my own baggage
in the context of being a fully functional, productive member
of society, why should I enter risk-fraught, baggage-heavy real
relationships.
That
there may be no downside that we are evolving into a society
of monads attached to computer screens, iPods and iPhones begs
the question. It is not, in and of itself, a necessarily negative
development that we are losing the mental muscle required to
carry the baggage of others with whom we were once vitally interconnected.
But if there is a price to pay, we owe it to ourselves own up
to the consequences as it concerns the malaises of modernity:
loneliness, falling birth rates and anthropophobia, feelings
of anxiety with other people.
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