Getting Lighter Later in Life

I wish this was about weight I’ve lost—specifically from my waist--but it isn’t.

It’s about traveling light through airports and, well, the rest of one’s life. I’m learning that shedding useless emotional baggage I’ve carted around for decades can be as energizing as giving away clothes I no longer wear.

In the past few years, I’ve pared down both my closet and my expectations.

There were practical reasons for ditching most of my clothes: they were only collecting dust. I have worn a dress just one time in the past eight years, to a party celebrating my daughter’s marriage a couple of years ago. My writing life requires only a uniform of blue jeans and t-shirts, black jeans if I need to dress up which is rarely. I did save the dress (I had bought it to launch one of my books in Bangkok in 2003 and it folds up as small as a hanky), but ditched everything else. Everything. Shoes, skirts, fancy jackets. I could have had a Chico’s yard sale.

The easy-to-fold-up dress served my other goal to travel only carry-on which began in the final years of my travels as the Expat Expert. My moving company sponsor shipped my books ahead for me and my hosts would set up my power point presentation allowing me to roam the world hands free. I didn’t even use a mobile phone which frankly, I think shocked people more than the one small bag I carried.

On my lecture tours I would stop in each place for only two to three days so I didn’t need more than a couple of outfits. Hotel laundry ensured I was always wearing something fresh, although there was the time in Kuala Lumpur when the Hilton I was staying in told me my cleaning wouldn’t be ready for twenty-four hours. When I informed the poor employee receiving the brunt of my dismay that the delay would mean my speaking to members of the Malaysian-British Chamber of Commerce buck naked, they managed to speed up the process.

There is an art to carrying off carry-on.  As the writer of the article puts it:

It's a chance to pare down and simplify our lives, to discover what is truly essential and what is not.

The writer reminds us that we are more than the sum of our possessions. I also believe we do not have to be the sum of our earlier life experiences, not forever at any rate.

Yes, we spend a ridiculous amount of time in adulthood getting over childhood. There is an entire industry of health professionals devoted to helping us exhume our traumas and dramas as well as a mass media analyzing and labeling them.  And yes, the sum of our experiences adds up to who we become as adults.

But surely there is an expiration date on excuses, justifications and laying blame?

To me, getting older has allowed me to finally grow up. Aging has meant moving on with my life, no longer looking back all the time except when I want to remind myself of what is not only essential, but worth remembering.

My new lightness is far from being unbearable even if my jeans feel tighter. In fact, it has been utterly liberating.

Don’t wait until 60.