Someone I know had written in his LJ that when asking why some women wouldn’t date him, the reply was that he had a daughter and daughter = baggage.

This got me thinking about baggage and the attitude that someone having baggage is a bad thing. We all have our baggage and I think it is a good thing. Our baggage is what makes us interesting, someone worthwhile knowing.

When rolling up a character for D&D, if you got 18s and 18+s for all your stats, that is a real boring character. Yes, you would be successful in most things but you would be dull and the game would be dull. Some of the best characters I have had and have seen have been the ones with pretty good stats and one really bad stat. It gave the game life, a challenge to work around, something to really sink your teeth into.

In talking with a friend about this she stated, “Without baggage we would never be able to change our outfits.” I love this. Without baggage, we would be essentially one dimensional. And as any of you that know me, I like having a lot of outfits to choose from and I wear many of them when I can.

I think the most important thing about baggage is not what it is or how much of it you have, but how you handle it. If you don’t handle it well, then yes it can get ugly and people don’t want to be around you. If you don’t work on stacking it well, part fall off, hit the floor and splatter ick all over those around you. I think this is where baggage got the bad name.

My major focus at this point in my life is my baggage and how I handle it. I am working very hard to pull it out, examine it, repack it and stack it neatly so I can get to it easily when needed. All this while dealing properly with the day to day accumulation of more baggage. I am also studying how to work with other people’s baggage and differentiate between theirs and mine. When you start looking at it from this perspective, you can start to see how hard it is to own your own baggage instead of foisting it off on someone else and how hard it is not to accept someone else’s baggage as something you need to deal with.

I am hoping I am managing to assemble a nice set of matching baggage, maybe with wheels so it is easier to drag with me everywhere. Because it does go with me everywhere. And I would like it to all fit together nicely so there is less opportunities for pieces to fall off, scattering those around me with icky Gina goo.

THE EARLY YEARS IN LIFE’S LABOR-YNTH
In life’s labor-ynth
We package our past.
Stack it and store it
And try to ignore it.
In barrel and box
Bolted and binned
Days packed away
Awaiting the light
Gathering dust.
Shall we peek within?
Maybe we may.
Maybe we might.
Maybe we must.
~Michael Flynn, “Firestar,” the character Styx

I have been thinking about this “baggage” concept and post for a couple of weeks. I read the above passage tonight and felt moved to write all this out. I poetry doesn’t normally make sense to me. I get lost partway through and things seem pointless and confusing. I am a rather literal person and poetry is not a straight line. Every now and then, I come across the rare poem that not only makes sense to me when I read it but actually speaks to me. These are the ones that I stop and take notice, these are the ones that seem very important because of their rarity.

With my work over the last two years with the labyrinth and the focus I have digging into my past that has been locked away that seems to have come to a head over the last few months, this poem seems very well timed. I really like the concept of Labor-ynth. I am reading Firestar because the author Michael Flynn is going to be at Worldcon and I thought it appropriate to be reading some hard science fiction during a literary science fiction convention. The book was copyrighted in 1996 and I think it is interesting that I am reading it now.