matching baggage

I have a friend who has one of the biggest hearts in the world.  She is such and amazing friend and I know that if I ever needed her in the middle of the night that she would be there for me.   I was hanging out with her this week when she got a phone call from one of her co-workers, she didn’t answer if because I was there. First of all, I was shocked that she didn’t answer the call; as a society we tend to take calls and texts when we are with other people and it has become acceptable to do so.  The second thing that surprised me was the conversation that fallowed.

I know my friend’s co-worker and my friend started to talk about how she felt bad that her clients didn’t want to work with her co-worker.  My friend was going to call her co-worker back and explain to her why she was working with the clients today and make sure that her co-workers feelings wouldn’t be hurt.  I looked at my friend and asked “why is it your problem that your co-workers feelings are being hurt because you are doing your job?”  My friend looked at me as if no one had ever said that to her before.  She has a heart of gold and wouldn’t ever want to hurt someone, so she felt that it was her job to make sure that her co-worker was feeling good about herself.  After talking a little more my friend decided not to call her co-worker back, and just see how the card fell.

My question to you is whose baggage are you carrying that you don’t need to travel with?  I know that many of us take on other problems because that is what we do, we fix things.  Or you may be a person that just doesn’t want to tell others anything bad, so you take on their problems so they don’t have to feel the pain.  What benefits are you gaining by doing this?  My guess would be that you are loosing sleep, or withdrawing from other activities in your life because of the problems you have taken on?

Take a look at what is going on in your life and who actually has control over it.  If you have control over it, decide how you want to handle the situation; but if you don’t have control, I challenge you to let go.  What!? Let go of problems I can’t control?  I know what a concept.  As I have gotten older I have found that I worry about things that I don’t have control over, or I take on others problems because I don’t want them to feel pain. If you are protecting people, how will they ever get the opportunity to grow and learn how to take care of them selves?

This will be hard, and I still struggle with it regularly.  I have spent countless hours working on my baggage, and why would I want to carry someone else’s when I still have to carry my own.  And on top of it all, my baggage is a matching set, and I would like to keep it that way!

You have it all & Confidence,

Lyndsay