“Bag Lady, you gone miss yo bus. You can’t hurry up; you got too much stuff….”

I’ve had Erykah Badu’s Bag Lady in my head all day. I finally just realized that the song is about baggage and not literally a “bag lady.” I am so naïve sometimes. “Baggage” has been brought up 3 times this week which I find strange since it’s typically not something I hear about much. When I think of someone with baggage, I usually think of a little old feeble woman with a little yellow wig slightly askew, wearing a little old lady dress with brown floral prints, with too-red lipstick settling in her wrinkled lips, sitting in a small cluttered apartment that smells stale, filled with old newspapers and plastic covered furniture, sucking on hard candy, watching a game show as her only friend-a pet bird-squawks in the background and maybe one old holey stocking is rolled down exposing a leg that’s patched with dry spots and greenish-purple varicose veins and is in desperate need of a shave. She’s completely alone. Maybe she’s content. After all, her nails are meticulously painted. Its only in the last quiet moments before she drifts off to sleep does she think about her life and the missed opportunities. Truth is all of us have baggage: baggage from a previous relationship, from a previous job, from a previous life…

I guess I’m lucky to have baggage that I trip over every now and then, that I can stick in a corner and let it collect dust and not the type of baggage that takes up every inch of space, towering over you, denying you of oxygen…suffocating. But I’m not attached to much either. I’m not one for sentimental trinkets and old this and that. I guess it’s a bad thing, too, because I really don’t have much of my past, but it’s because it’s my past. Why hang on to it-especially the bad stuff. Why not look forward, instead of back? Why would you want to remember how so-and-so treated you like crap, or how so-and-so cheated on you, or how so-and-so really screwed you out of a promotion or money or clients? Why hang on to something that’s gone, never was, and never will be? On the flip, they say that if you forget history, you’re doomed to repeat your past. Is forgetting part of that baggage or is remembering? And what about those good things, do they hinder you, too? I guess it depends. Does it hurt to think back on lost opportunities of love? Do you ever think about the “what ifs”? How would your life have been different if you wound up with your high school love who is now a very successful business man, medical doctor, lawyer, mechanic? Do you base your decisions on a past standard that can’t be met (and probably wasn’t as you remembered anyway)? “All you must hold on to is you, is you, is you….” “Girl I know sometimes it’s hard and we can’t let go, Oh, when someone hurts you oh so bad inside, you can’t deny it, you can’t stop crying….” “Bag Lady.” “One day all them bags, gone get in your way….” “Pack light.” Sometimes it’s easier said than done. But the answer is so simple. “Let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go.”