unpacking

As I write this, it’s midday on Monday and I’ve unpacked a suitcase, done a load of washing, the grocery shopping, and I’ve been to a 90 minute yoga class. I hit the ground running on this chilly Monday morning.

We’ve just come back from another weekend away. I’m very aware of how lucky we are to have the opportunity to go away and spend time with family. In our corner of the world, we have largely avoided the Covid-19 menace due mostly to our physical isolation and the ability to slam shut the borders. My dear friend and birthday twin Tara lives in Canada and just ‘celebrated’ her 50th without her beloved family. She had her lovely man and good friends but it must have hurt to be away from her parents. My heart goes out to every who is still isolating for the common good. May this all pass soon, but may it forever remind us of the important ‘things’ in life.

Hubby and I have been enjoying a few nice weekends away recently. After years and years of working our butts off, we realised that all work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy indeed and suddenly there were travel bans and we couldn’t go anywhere! I always vowed that weekends were sacred, family time, because I pretty much worked every weekend from the age of 14. In my mid 20s, I quit my day job to pursue my ‘art career’ and started a business that required me to, get this, work at the markets every damn weekend! Madness! But after a while I built a wholesale business a which allowed me to drop the weekends. Then somehow we bought a business that basically took over our lives for 12 years. We love travel but somehow found ourselves in a 24/7/365 business. I’m sure a good psychologist could unpack why, why, why we did that…

I guess it’s a bit like writing, making art, or learning an instrument or trade. You do the work and it pays off later. We’re fortunate that we can chill a bit now after working our butts off. It’s not always the case, I know. That’s the beauty of being human; we keep trying even though nothing at all is certain. As it happens, this morning’s yoga teacher, the amazing Cam, was talking about ‘unpacking.’ Unpacking our karma, unpacking who we have become, peeling off the layers obscuring our no-thing-ness, our formlessness. We unpack, and unpack, and unpack some more. We’ve got layers, like onions, to quote Shrek. We’re all a work in progress and unlike a suitcase we can’t unpack it all at once.