Monday Minute #9
What Will You Put in Your Backpack?
When I reached out to my boxing trainer, Lou, to set up a one-on-one Zoom session last week, he texted me, “Do you have a bookbag that you can make heavy with books?”
My apartment overflows with books. Five bookshelves. One vintage school locker. “To be read” piles littering my coffee table, one arm of my sofa, and my nightstand. My latest lockdown self-mandate: go through all my books and sort the ones I can finally give away. I’ve made zero progress. I love my books. All of them. They map the past two decades of my life.
Books on relationship trauma recovery. Books on the creative process. My travel memoir phase. Research books on introversion and social anxiety, for my own book project. Books on fear, for my sequel. Books in Italian so I can practice reading aloud. Books that saved my life.
To prepare for my Zoom boxing session, I grabbed a backpack from a closet, still dusty from a Backroads hiking adventure trip to Patagonia. I scanned my bookshelves for hardbacks. I filled the backpack with the heaviest tomes: books about writing and psychology, plus coffee table books about Picasso, street art, and of course, U2. In the remaining space, I added a novel I loved and hadn’t read in years, Francesca Marciano’s Rules of the Wild. I tucked in a copy of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation — laughing at how my law students might think that’s funny. I squeezed in a copy of a book I wrote — its cover has boxing gloves and tangled red laces — and zipped the bag closed. I grabbed a strap and gave it a few tugs. Heavy.
I logged into Zoom. Lou asked me to put on the backpack. He leapt right into boxing drills. I punched, I lunged, I shuffled, I pivoted, I sweated, I gasped. A lot. He taught me how to shift my weight properly, move my head out of the way of a punch, angle my feet. At intervals, he had me set the backpack down and ran me through different drills, now lighter on my feet. As a teacher myself, I appreciated his creativity, thoughtfulness, and flexibility in improvising how he taught me. The best part: he used a simple item that I love to motivate me.
This experience taught me how we can use a tangible object that helps us mentally and emotionally — books, and all the carefully chosen words of all those authors — to fortify our physical frames.
This experience also got me thinking about relationships with our past, our so-called “baggage.” I’m glad I kept all those books that helped me through challenging times, even if they just sit quietly on my shelves keeping me company. I’m glad I went through those tough, darkest days. I had to, to get to the good stuff. It gets so much better. And as Lou showed me, we can literally lift up our so-called “baggage” to build up our strength and grow, and then when it makes sense to set down the weighty cargo, we can fly free.
So, life is handing us an empty backpack right now. What will you put in it?
