As hard as it is for me to admit, the very first time I ever flew I packed … my pillow!

I was in my twenties when I first flew on a plane and my employer sent me to Christchurch for a night to help out with Health & Safety. So being the first time I had ever packed for a plane flight, I packed like I was touring around the country again by road. I grabbed the one massive suitcase I owned and filled it with everything I might need.

Business pants and shirts … and extra pants and shirts just in case. Casual clothes x 2 … just in case. Pretty much I packed two of everything, just in case, and even after packing two of everything I still had room for my comfortable perfectly sized pillow.

Nowadays … wow things have changed. Long gone are the days of packing a pillow and I can travel for a week or more with carry-on luggage. I have learnt that if you want to travel light you need to take a lot less stuff and you need to have a small bag. One needs to relentlessly remove all extra this, the emergency that, and then in some cases remove things you really think you will need.

As you might have guessed this post has a double meaning.

Firstly, you should travel light, you seriously should. Carry on only. You might actually enjoy it and its unlikely you will be missing anything.

And, I’m starting to see that we have a heap of extra things in our lives, both home and work. We need to get rid of all those things that we really don’t need, and all that stuff that we have just in case.

Maybe we should get rid of anything that isn’t

useful,

beautiful

or joyful.

I bet we have a lot of stuff in our homes and offices that doesn’t fit that criteria.

∴

An interesting change occurs when you try to travel light. You don’t want to go back and you tend to travel lighter and lighter, whereas before I would try to take more and more.

I wonder if it’s not the same with our things. The more we have the more we want, and maybe if we started reducing what we have… we would become more satisfied with what we’ve got.