Send Your Old Self on Vacation
Some luggage isn't worth claiming
Sunday is not a day I write. That’s the rule, and it’s a good one. And here I am, before dawn, days before a flight to somewhere warm, trying to build the calm I’m supposed to find there before I’ve even packed a bag.
That’s the whole problem, on display, in real time. Not a contradiction I want to smooth over.
Here’s what’s actually running in the background right now.
Forty browser tabs I’ll never close on purpose.
A to-do list where the electric bill sits next to a podcast I meant to relisten to and a half-finished plan to be a better version of myself.
One son’s apartment search. The other son’s senior year and every college that comes with it.
A box of paper in the closet I haven’t opened in a year, and I genuinely don’t know what’s in it.
Said fast like that, it sounds like one thing. It isn’t. But they blur together anyway, and the blur is what wears you down, not any one item on the list.
There’s a deadline underneath all of this, and deadline is the wrong word, or maybe it’s the right word finally being used honestly.
The kind that makes you choose. Not the kind that makes your stomach drop.
My mind runs wide by default, everywhere at once, chasing connections nobody asked it to chase, and most days that’s useful. It’s also how forty tabs happen.
A flight with one bag and one week attached to it doesn’t care how useful wide is. It only asks what actually matters enough to bring.
Hindsight has told me the same thing more than once, and I keep needing to hear it again: the clarity never came from adding anything. It came from cutting.
Brian Johnson wrote a line years ago that I’ve never let go of, built out of research on identity and presence, but the phrase is his: sending the old you on permanent vacation.
A vacation FROM yourself. Not a break from yourself. The old version. The one who opens twelve tabs to close one.
So here’s the actual work this week, before the plane, and it’s not the flowery kind.
It needs to get sorted. Not everything in that pile needs to disappear. What has a Tuesday attached to it, and what’s just loud.
What’s actually mine to carry, and what I’ve been carrying out of habit because nobody ever asked me to put it down.
Addition by subtraction was never about throwing everything out. It’s about finally being honest about which pieces were ever load-bearing in the first place.
This time the sorting isn’t happening alone either.
There’s a staff behind it now that wasn’t there a few posts back, the org chart I wrote about, and that’s part of what makes this attempt different from the ones before it.
I know why I care this much about getting it right. Somebody’s counting on the floor holding. Husband. Father. Brother. Son. The one who’s supposed to be the rock.
The storm that ripped the shutters off the front of the house didn’t check my calendar first. My parents are getting older whether I’ve closed my loops or not, and my sister is carrying that same worry without waiting for me to catch up. And a marriage doesn’t run on autopilot for twenty years just because everything else is loud; it actually has to be tended, on purpose, the same way anything else worth keeping does.
Holding still isn’t the same as leading, and the version of me actually worth being isn’t just standing there; it’s the one who can see past the mess long enough to point somewhere. That’s not a complaint. It’s just the truth sitting underneath all the tabs.
A week away is a small thing. One suitcase, one island, seven days. But it’s also the test.
The easy version is coming home rested and sliding right back into the old operating system by Tuesday, scattered again, tabs open again, the box still unopened in the closet. The harder version, the one actually worth chasing, is coming home with the same clarity I built this week, and keeping it running past the trip.
A permanent vacation from the old self, not a temporary one.
So which is it going to be?
Do you leave him at the airport, or do you let him carry your bag back through customs?