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, defined 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 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, 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. The most obvious is the abused child turned into
an abuser adult. Someone who has special attention needs might
be addressing abandonment issues just as people chronically
late for appointments are revenging, compensating for happenstance
(poverty, displacement, bad luck) over which they were powerless
to affect. It is the prerogative (rarely refused in practice)
of powerful people to make others wait for or on them. These
are the relatively easy cases where for every exceptional behavioural
pattern there is a cause which becomes the indelible content
of someone’s psychological baggage.
People
who make unwise choices in friendships either underestimate
the baggage of the other or their ability to handle 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
and mental fortitude. We often uncritically attribute to the
hermit or recluse a 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 Latin America
(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 all that it implies.
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 luggage.
On that most delicate and disconcerting subject of 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
effects 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
brave enough to recognize that I’m happiest carrying only
my own baggage in the context of being a fully functional, productive
member of society, why should I deny myself those pleasures
or shy away from making the case that virtual world narcissism
is its own reward -- until proven otherwise?
That
there may be no downside to the fact that we have become a society
of monads attached to computer screens, iPods and iPhones begs
the question. But before we lament the loss of traditional community
life and celebrate the emergence of individualism (isolationism),
we owe it to ourselves as a species to carefully weigh the pros
and cons of each before passing judgment. 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 since this advent
is of potentially epochal significance socially, it deserves
intense study and review because -- above and beyond every other
consideration -- it is our first duty as a life form to project
ourselves into the future, and it doesn’t matter a whit
how we get there as long as we get there.
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