Bags Please! We all have baggage but at some point you have to start unpacking. By Luyanda Sibisi

Bismillah this article was written by my friend and sister Luyanda Sibisi. She is a published Writer, Her article inspired me write the Bags article of my own. Whether it’s a new marriage, new career or being a new mom, baggage is the one bag you want to pack lightly on. I’ve always loved the song Bag Lady by Erykah Badu, I always thought I was the beat but the older I got the more I realized that there was more. ‘I guess nobody ever told you, all you must hold on to is you.’ This is my favourite part of the song. She reassures you that whichever situation you come out of all you need to have held onto is yourself. Your identity. Your faith. Your spirit. Baggage is when you take all the stuff from a bad experience usually the negative stuff and you carry it around with you. What is unclear to me is why we feel we need to own this stuff, make it our own. We expect our current situation and all those involved to understand that you’ve arrived with an excessive amount of luggage they whether or not they have space for it. We’ve all seen how kids love to show off their scars to their friends after a nasty fall. Once the scar has healed they still try to endlessly search for this scar almost to show off to their friends that they survived a dreadful fall in the park. We do exactly the same thing with our baggage, even though the contents of the bags are things we packed twenty years ago we insist on carrying it along with us to show people what we’ve been through and how far we’ve come. Why can’t we take our bags, acknowledge what we’ve been through but let them go when time says its ok to let go. There’s a prayer I love to read out whenever I feel my baggage overflowing it’s the well known serenity prayer; ‘Lord give me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.’ There are scars in my bag I will always keep with me like scars from childbirth. The scars from the incision the doctor made bringing my child into the world are scars I wear with pride, I know that this is something I should carry and even look at as a beautiful reminder of that day. There are the scars I know I should not be packing in my bag, things that prevent me from building meaningful relationships with people and growing as a human being. So let’s take stock, start unpacking our bags and really look into the things we would much rather do without. Trust me you’ll feel so much lighter! “I guess nobody ever told you, all you must hold onto is you”