Backpacks, Miracles, and Immortality

1. My Backpack

This is my backpack. Throughout my life, it’s been strapped on my back everywhere I go. It resembles an old army green military pack.

As the distance has grown between my youth and where I am now, pondering what comes after I pass from this life, so has my pack. It’s enormous, reaching far above my head on top and below my knees on the bottom. From side to side it reaches out well beyond my shoulders. And, it’s heavy. It contains everything I’ve collected emotionally throughout my life. What I consider to be good stuff, and what others may think is bad stuff, and stuff that doesn’t really matter to anyone, except me.

I haven’t always been aware of my burden. But I can see and feel the weight of it as I approach my final days. People talk about their baggage. This is close, but not quite. You can put baggage down. But a backpack is strapped to you. It becomes a part of you.

Everybody has a backpack, and I’ve grown to see them. Most people don’t know about their own backpack, but they are aware of the invisible weight on their shoulders.

Backpacks come in all different colors and sizes. I’ve described mine. Some people are encumbered by much larger backpacks than mine; others, much smaller. I will say that, from my experience, the people with the lightest backpacks are usually assholes.

You have one too, and you can’t take it off. It’s yours to carry for the rest of your life.

Your pack is filled with all your worries and fears. All of them. Since your first worry and your first fear. Everything that has ever made you angry, sad, or happy. Everything that has ever made you laugh or cry. All your disappointments and the things you’re most proud of are strapped on your shoulders too. Joy, rage, things you care about, things you pretend to be ambivalent about, and everything that has ever left an impression on you, good or bad, fills your pack throughout your life. Name any emotion, it’s in there.

All the people you truly love, and the people you truly hate are in there too. And they are equally cumbersome. They say that true love lifts you up. This is not true. Love by itself isn’t a heavy burden to carry. But love adds to your happiness, worries, and fears. It also puts other new things into your backpack. Things like insecurity and jealousy (which is very, very heavy). The weight of the people you hate is ponderous too, but in a different way. Hatred is a big, dead weight. Carrying hate around is like carrying a mattress everywhere you go.

Your pride and your ego are in your backpack too. Their weight is directly proportionate to the amount of effort you put into protecting them.

Here are some things that are not in your backpack. Knowledge, facts, reason, logic, and creativity. These things reside in your head. But they are influenced by the contents of your pack. A bigot’s knowledge and facts are warped by what he carries on their shoulders. And I think everyone can relate to an artist’s work being influenced by their life’s experience.

As I have gotten older, I have discovered that I can control the weight of many of the things I carry. I don’t believe you can ever reduce the number of things in your backpack, but if you really, really try, and can be completely honest with yourself, you can reduce the weight of the heaviest items by downgrading them. Hatred can become pity. Pride and ego can become humility. Anger can transform into understanding. And my “go to” when things get too heavy to bear is magnanimity. This isn’t easy, and it isn’t meant to be. I think this is why they call it, “growth”. Because as you lighten your load, you stand a little taller.

2. The Miracle

I’m not a religious person. I’m somewhere on the side of atheism in that I don’t believe in a divine power that watches over us. But I have experienced a miracle, which I will tell you about now. Remember I told you that you can’t remove your backpack. Well, that’s not completely true, at least not for me.

I drop to my knees and gently brush my granddaughter’s hair away from her eyes.

Sometimes when she and I are together, not always, but sometimes when we’re really connected, my backpack falls from my shoulders.

But that’s not the miracle. The miracle is that when I become completely unencumbered by all my life’s emotional accruals, I turn into a child again. I become her peer and equal because anything that was in my backpack that would keep me from engaging with my soul, as a child, are absent.

I think most people share a common fantasy; I wish I could return to childhood but retain all of the knowledge I’ve amassed to this point.

I’ve carried this fantasy around since I can remember, and I’ve had the same ideas you’ve had about what I would do if I could go back to childhood without losing my knowledge. I would be rich because I would know enough sports history to win every bet I’d make. I’d buy Microsoft stock in the 80’s. I’d get straight A’s and go to college under scholarship. I’d stay away from girls and focus on baseball so I could go pro someday. The list goes on, but I think you get it. The point is; these things are all impossible.

When the miracle happens, I don’t go back in time. I’m in the here and now. Eye to eye, soul to soul with my granddaughter with all the knowledge, facts, reason, logic, and creativity I’ve accumulated throughout all my years on this planet. And these things are pure because my backpack is no longer strapped to my back.

3. Immortality

So, there I am. Playing with my granddaughter as a child with half a lifetime of knowledge and creativity filled in my head. I immediately know what to do; impart what I know. But not like an adult would impart information to a child. As a child would impart information to another child.

Most children have short attention spans. So, knowing this, I slip mini lessons into whatever activity in which we are engaged. If the mini lesson is related to what we are doing or talking about, and she opts in on her own, then I know that what she learns will become part of her forever.

Here is a good example. We were playing the other day and talking about Shrek. I asked her which character was her favorite and she said, "Donkey". I said, “Donkey’s OK, but he would irritate me for the same reason he is always irritating Shrek; he’s too verbose".

At this point, she has heard the word, “verbose”. If I give her a definition without her asking for one, it may or may not stick. But if she asks first, then whatever I tell her will become a permanent part of her vocabulary.

She asks, “What’s verbose?” And I look at her, make a funny, childish face, and say, “It means he talks too much!” And we laugh together, briefly. Then we move on.

That’s what I mean by mini lesson. One word or concept at a time. Brief, concise, playful, move on. It seems like so little, but in my heart, I know the knowledge, facts, reason, logic, and creativity I feed her in tiny bite size, optional chunks are the greatest gifts she will ever receive.

And there’s something in all of this for me too; immortality. The more stuff I transfer from my head to hers, the more of me will carry on after I die. And, because she will remember our time together fondly when she becomes engaged with a child, hers or not, now or in the future, she will impart the same information in the same way.

4. Ripples

There’s one more thing I need to tell you before I’m finished. My granddaughter has a backpack too.

River’s backpack is rainbow colored. It is minuscule compared to mine, but to me, it looks big on her. I’ve seen enormous backpacks on other children, so I don’t think hers is abnormally large, but it makes me feel sad, nonetheless. The very idea of a child carrying a burden at all makes me feel sad. But that is how we grow; by how we deal with the burden we carry through life.

I’ve tried to take things out of her backpack. I can’t. But I can use our mini lessons to give her the tools she needs to manage the weight of the pack she carries.

The other thing I can do is to be very careful about what I add to it.