Sometimes that Harper Faulkner Gets a Little too Real

English: A Little Baggage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am happily reading your posts and relishing every moment.  It’s 5:25 pm on a Tuesday  and I am pretty pleased with myself that this day has not gone to waste.  Yet.  I did a lovely reorganization of my living quarters that ended up being an exhausting but rewarding endeavour.  Then I click on The Measure of Success .  I read the quotation that’s been on his mind and think ‘Uh Oh’, because then he asks a question.

So the question I am asking myself this morning, and asking you, is what problems in 2012 did you bring with you into 2013 and can you, without needed outside intervention, solve those problems right now, right here, today?

Many of you, my delicious sources of entertainment, often ask questions in your posts.   I always consider them and then sometimes tuck them away for future consideration (avoidance at its best), possibly even find an easy answer for (slightly delusional here), and sometimes I face it head on (though I may not share my thoughts with you).

But it is difficult when HF asks a question.  He seems so sincere in the asking that one feels that answering is unavoidable.  I have been wrestling with my baggage for sometime now – months, and decide at times that it really is not important so there should be no struggle, but its a convenient answer and does not address the issue.  I have even bravely asked myself how I see the me I want to be, but yikes that is really scary so I don’t spend a lot of time on the thought.  But the thought keeps returning.  Again and again.

I did leave a comment for him, but then realized I could not adequately answer in a comment.

We have baggage because it must give us something, provide something – maybe excuses.  I honestly don’t know the answer to that one.

I read on a blog sometime ago, and wish I could remember whose it was, that someone they knew had been in a coma for months, and then suddenly sat up one day and said, “Nothing matters” and then died.  That has taken up residence in my palace of thoughts and while I consider all kinds of possible meanings, I have failed to arrive at any conclusions.

You know in my time as a nurse (many decades) I have been present at a lot of deaths.  Most have been wonderful experiences but some people have expressed that they wish they had done life differently or done something differently or wished they had made different decisions.  Some expressed regret that they had not done enough.  Enough is a pretty personal measurement so who can judge?

When I was younger I used to think that I would die with no regrets, that I would follow every path I could.  But that is a very naive thought because for every path we follow, every choice we make, we leave so many others undone.  Which in some strange way takes me back to the whole baggage thing for there is much that is undone, and yes until I can shed baggage it will be difficult to accomplish.

HF you certainly have stoked the fires of my soul, plainly asking what I have spent so long skirting around.  I don’t even have a whole answer as to the what or the how, but I guess I had better get on with it.  Procrastination is perhaps not as permanent a solution I hoped it was.